Nicely Crafted

Rating: 9/10 (7 October 2003)

Every man wants the Red Violin. Why? Well, the reason why is the big mystery revealed in the final scenes of this very clever piece of work. Spanning three continents and several centuries, the film has the look of a lavish production but somehow was made on a small ten million dollar budget.

I liked it a lot. There must be a half dozen stories crammed into this epic, all very well told, some sexy but mostly tragic. The script is merciless on the very engaging characters and it seems to have a slightly wry, almost cruel sense of humor as they are put through their travails. I admired the beautiful, stylish photography and inventive direction that makes the imagery stick with you -- especially one hypnotic montage spanning generations while gypsies play the violin as it somehow appears to be suspended, immobile in the frame.
But the real story is the adventure of this violin. Men fall in love with it, it is buried and resurrected by gypsy grave robbers. It becomes a pawn in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and is nearly incinerated.

What really stands out though is the brilliant way multiple timelines are interleaved, overlapped, flashed forward and back rhythmically but without any confusion. Some say there are three timelines, I counted five.
As you watch, you see odd occurrences -- like a woman who discovers her lover cheating. She finds a gun and shoots -- not him or his companion but the violin. The big supernatural revelation at the end makes all those puzzling scenes suddenly make sense. But the end also tends to reduce the whole story to a macabre and naughty little joke that just makes you smile.

And the ending, as startling as it is, is the problem. The movie outdoes the message. When people see a movie that looks this grand, they leave with an empty feeling if they are not treated to profound statements about life and the human condition. But that is not what the Red Violin is about. True, it has a lot of good drama but it is not a morality play at all. Don't look for heroes (there is a heroine -- but that would be telling).

If anything, and even this may be a stretch, it is about lust, the coveting of a finely-crafted thing of beauty. But that is what the Red Violin is -- an intricately cut jewel of a film. Expect no more than that.