For full-time movie critics, the banality of repetitious, cookie cutter, assembly line film productions often make such films the bane of our existence. That's why we rejoice when every so often a filmmaker and their latest offering comes along and turns everyday cinematic conventions on their head. By delivering compelling, moving and/or unconventionally plotted films that are far different from the normal fair to which we're usually subjected, such films reinvigorate the industry as a whole.
Of all the cinematic devices that can be used to achieve that worthy goal, a favorite of mine is when films play with time. I'm not referring to time travel movies -- although they can quite a bit of fun if properly thought out -- but ones whose plot temporally hops and skips both forward and backward through time, often revisiting the same moment but from a different perspective.
Although Quentin Tarantino popularized the effect with "Pulp Fiction," it dates back to films such as Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" and was recently used to great acclaim in Doug Liman's "Go." Now it's been effectively used in "The Red Violin," the latest film from director François Girard and co-screenwriter Don McKellar. While a previous film of theirs, "Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould," contained -- yes, you guessed it -- thirty-two short "stories" -- they've parred this one down to just five.
Contained within a plot that continually jumps both forward and backward through time, the five stories don't all focus on the same event from different perspectives like those other films. The present day auction footage, however, does serve as a jumping off point for the stories that repeatedly return to the auction and cumulatively raise the audience's expectations of what will occur in the final story.
The temporal effect, while not as jarring as in "Pulp Fiction" or "Go" where the audience suddenly finds that the story has been rewound, is compelling. It also effectively ties together those rather disparate stories and makes what would initially seem to be a rather humdrum affair about a violin and its various owners far more intriguing.
It also doesn't hurt that the films' technical merits are not only topnotch, but also imaginatively and effectively utilized. Being a film about a musical instrument, it's probably not that surprising that an important element is its sound. From the solo violin work that nicely changes in tone and elicited mood from one story to another, to John Corigliano's ("Altered States") score that's appropriately mesmerizing and foreboding, the film consistently sounds great.
That's not to shortchange the visuals, however, as they're just as effective as the aural elements.
Cinematographer Alain Dostie's ("Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould") efforts are both sumptuous and inventive, featuring many interesting, but thankfully not distracting effects.
For example, a sequence involving various violin playing gypsies -- seemingly glued to the front of the camera so that they move in unison with it -- is mesmerizing and nothing less than perfectly executed for that particular moment.
Constantly employing other interesting visuals and viewpoints -- such as peering out at Samuel L. Jackson's character from within the violin -- Dostie never lets the picture become boring to watch. The production design -- courtesy of François Séguin ("Love! Valour! Compassion!") -- is also very good, with each story having its own appropriately distinctive and completely believable look.
That distinctive nature holds true for the stories themselves. While it's hard to imagine one film including the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a late 17th century Italian violin maker and a present day auction, this one manages to pull it off. Viewers, however, will probably have differing reactions to the various stories that, due to time constraints, never get fully developed.
Therein lies the film's greatest problem. To give each story its due, that would require more screen time for each, but as a cumulative whole, the film starts to feel a little long by the time the fourth story -- set in revolutionary China -- rolls around. As such, one doesn't wish for the film to be much longer, but as it stands, some of the stories feel a bit shortchanged.
It's not a horrible problem as each is compelling in its own right, but some may be bothered that just when the stories get interesting, they're abandoned for the subsequent ones. Fortunately and for the most part, the characters within them more than adequately survive the truncation. Although I felt somewhat disconnected from the characters in the Chinese segment and those involving the English musician and his literary mistress were a bit over the top, the remaining ones were quite interesting.
As such, the performances in them are decent -- notwithstanding the somewhat campily romantic lovers -- and occasionally quite compelling. The standouts include Samuel L. Jackson as the intense appraiser who does a nice job of keeping his often fiery outbursts down to a smoldering simmer, French actor Jean-Luc Bideau as the poor, but knowing music teacher, and Christoph Koncz as his young and ailing charge.
While the film's individual elements are admirable in their own right, the overall production is one that falls under the description of being greater than the sum of its parts. While some may complain of its slow tempo, somewhat disjointed nature or overall length, many will find the film quite intriguing.
We certainly found it that way, and considering the interesting temporal jumps, the incredibly effective combination of visuals and music, and finally the subdued, but slightly creepy supernatural undercurrent that runs throughout it (a sequence near the end explains that part), think it's one of the more interesting pictures released this year. As such, we give "The Red Violin" a 7.5 out of 10.
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