The
Red Violin (Le Violon Rouge in French-speaking Canada)
is about a musical instrument with perfect acoustical qualities
that carried a curse on its many owners from the time it was
made by a Niccòlo Bussoti (played by Carlo Cecchi) in 1681
until the present day, when it is sold for millions at an
auction house in Montréal. The journey of the violin starts
in Cremona, Italy, goes to a monastery in Vienna, and then
gypsies take the instrument to London. A Chinese man takes
the violin from England to Shanghai, where he pawns it, and
a violinist buys the red violin, hides it from those who might
burn it during the Cultural Revolution along with all things
Western, and then it is sold along with some seventy other
violins to a collector, who turns the lot over to Canadian
auctioneers. Toward the end of the film we learn that the
red coloring came from the blood of the violin-maker’s wife
Anna (played by Irene Grazioli), who died in childbirth. When
the film ends, we see Charles Morritz (played by Samuel L.
Jackson), an antique violin authenticator brought in to determine
which instrument is the red violin, exchanging red violins
just before the sale at the auction, leading us to believe
either that he stole the red violin or that he originally
intended to steal the famous violin but changed his mind at
the last minute in order to avoid the fate of death that has
befallen everyone who has possessed it. In short, the film
consists of several short stories of different times and places,
providing the cross-cultural wisdom that the modern age in
the West is incredibly parochial. Released last year at film
festivals in Toronto and Venice, and this year for release
in the United States, the plot is not new—we have seen the
same concept developed in The Dress (1996),
Tales of Manhattan (1942), Twenty Bucks
(1993), The Yellow Rolls Royce (1965), but perhaps
the film has more affinity to the Humphrey Bogart classics
The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure
of the Sierra Madre (1948),which focus on the price
of human greed in a world with many unmet basic human needs.
Perhaps the most rewarding element of the film is that the
director, François Girard, uses the story to provide a score
of classical musical not unlike his earlier Thirty-Two
Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993). MH
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