an irritating movie

Rating: 2/10 (27 April 2008)

This is my second try at watching this film, after a long interval, and after thinking I must have been wrong about how much I disliked it the first time. I'm completely open to a fragmented narrative constructed around an object traveling through time but this is thoroughly mediocre film-making and storytelling. Somewhere between the legitimate formats of "art film" and "mass entertainment" is the "failed art film," which offers only meager nourishment, and the joys of neither. The structure of Violin comes by way of "The Monkey's Paw," except here the lowbrow monkey paw is replaced by the snootier totem of a violin.
There are two types of tiresome scenes in this movie; people playing the violin... and viewers getting to know a string of aggravating characters. It's too long by an hour to include all those irritating virtuoso performances and familiar/obvious practice sequences. The historical sequences are all lifeless clunkers. This movie also does a pretty bad job with non-sequential time and narrative jumps. When mad lover Victoria pulls a gun and shoots the violin that is coming between her and her lover, I just rolled my eyes. You'v got to be kidding.. that's just over-the-top silly. I was laughing at the wrong points (Actually there are no laughs - it's oh-so-serious!) When the kid dropped dead as he was about to play his concerto, I burst out laughing. There's actually nothing funny about a kid dropping dead, but bad manipulative film-making is a laugh riot.
The only good moments I found in this were those depicting the cynical, blood-thirsty cultural revolution in China, which manage to suggest that the meaning of music is transitory. Perhaps you'll be as tired of violin music as I was about halfway through this. This story is as shallow as a puddle.