predictable boring and pretentious

Rating: 3/10 (18 May 2000)

Never in films like this is there any doubt exactly who will wind up dead, inconsolably miserable, and/or insane. Using inanimate objects to link otherwise unrelated scenarios can work (see e.g., the intriguing Finnish work, "Night on Earth") but in this movie it's just annoying. The RED violin is supposed to embody the continuity through time of human bleeding and suffering and striving and so forth, but the tool is so blunt it might as well just be a laughably "cursed" object as in the old tv series Friday the 13th. Although photographed well, the dialog and drama play out like cheap imitations of PBS made-for-tv historical drama.