San Francisco Classical Voice

About 15 minutes into the newly ballyhooed Lions Gate Films production The Red Violin, fully involved with what you believe is going to be great, you find yourself uttering the two most dreaded words in the language, "uh-oh." You are listening to the sounds of exuberant fornication through the closed doors of the dressing room of Frederick Pope, a kind of English "Paganini" who is the current master of the "perfect" violin. He is having it on with his lady love while conductor, orchestra and audience in the august premises of the concert hall at Oxford, are impatiently awaiting his appearance. Pope arrives, brushes the conductor aside and, announcing that he has just been inspired (by his bout with the lady of course), proceeds to improvise a brilliant etude.

All too soon, worst fears are realized as we next find her in his study, swarming all over Pope's near naked body as he continues to play on-- the violin that is. That brings on the sound most dreaded by a maker of a "serious" film. The audience breaks into laughter and keeps it up while the finally aroused Pope begins rubbing his genitals with the violin. Director Francois Girard and writer Don McKellar have lost it. In the film's final half, the last two major episodes, they finish the job, grubbing, reaching for what turns out to be a wholly unsatisfactory, not to say implausible ending.

It's a shame and a waste of a wonderful beginning, a fine idea, and imaginative direction. The scenes that establish the premise--the creation of the "perfect" instrument in the late 17th century workshop of a Cremona master, Nicolo Bussotti, a surly, temperamental genius, and then its career for its first 150 years-- are splendid, engrossing. Brilliantly, Girard set up a pattern for the film's structure, cutting back and forth in time, from then to now (a violin auction in today's Montreal).

Four times we are returned to the genesis, as an old crone turns over another tarot card, and describes to Bussotti's very pregnant wife the future, not of her and her unborn child, but of the violin itself. There are other flashbacks and flashforwards as the scene switches ahead to the auction scene, achieving a Proustian sense of time. In an arresting touch, as the violin's 300 years unfold, the five episodes are shot respectively in Cremona, Vienna, Oxford, Shanghai and Montreal and the dialog takes place in each country's language, with English supertitles.

The music is excellent, composed by John Corigliano, that gifted magpie who may not have a recognizable voice of his own but who certainly can craft up a style on command. You want virtual Vivaldi? You got it, in a rich version. Paganini? No problem. The violin on the sound track is played splendidly by Joshua Bell and accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen. conducting.

The passage of the violin from generation to generation down through its first 150 years is effectively conveyed. The violin music is played continuously as we see a string orchestra of orphans in an Austrian monastery being replaced by one set or generation of players after another. The same device works well later with a succession of gypsy fiddlers, each having inherited the violin in turn. Excellent up to that point when the Englishman acquires it.

After his suicide (what else?), his Chinese manservant returns to China in steerage, with the violin which he sells. Suddenly, with the leap of 100 years, we are deep in the Cultural Revolution. The violin is hidden to save it from destruction by the Red Guard, and years later is included in a shipment of fine violins from China to the Montreal auction house. The scenes in Shanghai are wonderfully shot, the enactment of the Cultural Revolution horror vivid and real but the story's lateral jump to China is totally strained and extraneous. By now, it is apparent that this is just another broad-brush, device-driven, exploitational film.

The final episode centers around the activities of the totally miscast American actor Samuel L. Jackson, in no way credible in the role of a violin expert. Hired by the Montreal auction house to oversee the restoration of the instrument, he recognizes its real identity and value and then pursues his own agenda. The film turns into a kind of high-tech, international detective story and finally, abruptly stops--you can't say the story really ends--- with a twist that can not satisfy the viewers. Maybe Girard and McKellar are setting us up for Red Violin II. As a wise and theater-savvy musician remarked, kindly, as we walked away from the New York City premiere on June 1, a benefit for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, "It's difficult to make a violin. It's difficult to make a movie."

(Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)

©1999 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved