The best film I have seen this year

Rating: 10/10 (22 August 1999)

"The Red Violin" is the most beautiful, haunting, best-directed and best-photographed film I have seen this year, and I say that AFTER having seen "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Life is Beautiful",and "Shakespeare In Love", all of which perhaps equal it, but do not surpass it. I have just bought Leonard Maltin's "Movie and Video Guide 2000",and am horrified by the fact that he gives it only two stars! I usually agree with him, but in films relating to classical music, he is usually WAY off-base----witness his 2 and 1/2 stars for "Amadeus", 2 stars for the 1984 "Carmen", and 3 and 1/2 for the film of Verdi's "Otello"!
"The Red Violin" is the poetic story of a legendary violin, the greatest musical instrument ever made, designed under mysterious circumstances during the Renaissance in Italy. (The circumstances are revealed fully ONLY near the end of the movie, so if you do not wish to know the solution to the "mystery", be careful which review you read.) The framing story of the film is the present day auction in Montreal at which the violin is scheduled to be sold. We are gradually taken, in flashbacks, through the story of the violin and all of its owners, in four different countries and five different languages----Italian, German, English, Chinese,and French.(yes, there are subtitles, but this film is so good that who cares?) The storytelling is absolutely mesmerizing--each twenty minute episode is seamlessly interlocked with the auction and linked by beautiful shots of the sea rolling. The acting is excellent, especially in the German episode featuring little Christoph Koncz as a hard-driven child prodigy and Jean-Luc Bideau as his well-meaning but misguided stepfather and tutor.
Greta Scacchi and Jason Flemyng, in the nineteenth-century British episode, are like lovers out of a Harlequin novel, but I have a feeling that this episode MUST have been done tongue-in-cheek; it is just too over-the-top compared with the dignity shown in every other episode. Samuel L. Jackson, in the framing segment, demonstrates incredible subtlety as an actor---watch his eyes as he listens for the first time to the red violin as it is played. The costumes, sets,and photography are ravishing--and most significant of all, there is John Corgliano's music--perhaps the finest musical score written for a film in more than twenty-five years, and no,I'm not forgetting John Williams' score for "Schindler's List", though THAT one comes the closest, and violinist Joshua Bell does the "Red Violin" score full justice.
Don't even think of passing this one up.