The Red Violin

Released 1998
Stars Samuel L. Jackson, Don McKellar, Carlo Cecchi, Irene Grazioli, Jean-Luc Bideau, Christoph Koncz, Jason Flemyng, Greta Scacchi, Sylvia Chang, Liu Zifeng, Colm Feore, Monique Mercure
Directed by François Girard

There is a kind of ideal beauty that reduces us all to yearning for perfection. "The Red Violin" is about that yearning. It traces the story of a violin ("the single most perfect acoustical machine I've ever seen," says a restorer) from its maker in 17th century Italy to an auction room in modern Montreal. The violin passes from the rich to the poor, from Italy to Poland to England to China to Canada. It is shot, buried, almost burned and stolen more than once. It produces music so beautiful that it makes you want to cry.

The film is heedlessly ambitious. In a time of timid projects and easy formulas, "The Red Violin" has the kind of sweep and vision that we identify with elegant features from decades ago--films that followed a story thread from one character to another. There really is a little something here for everyone: music and culture, politics and passion, crime and intrigue, history and even the backstage intrigue of the auction business. Not many films can encompass a British aristocrat who likes to play the violin while he is having sex and a Chinese woman who risks her life to protect a violin from the martinets of the Cultural Revolution. The film is easy to follow, and yet reveals its secrets slyly. The story of the violin is a series of stories involving the people who own it over a period of 300 years.

Summary written by Roger Ebert