Ambitious but insufficiently concerted

Rating: 6/10 (21 August 2006)

Francois Girard's film 'The Red Violin' is nothing if not ambitious: an attempt to make a movie whose star is a musical instrument. Lavishly produced, it shows us a series of stories about the various individuals who own a special violin over the course of several hundred years. Unfortunately, the stories don't really come together to make a resonant whole; and the finale, centred on Samuel L. Jackson's character, is of little interest: there's no underlying reason why we should care about this individual's relationship to the famous fiddle. This is not an awful film; but it lacks the edge of magic needed to make the concept work.