The Red Violin is the story of "the most perfect acoustic instrument ever made," a violin crafted by Nicolo Bussotti (Carlo Cecchi) for his unborn son. When Nicolo's wife Anna (Irene Grazioli) dies in labor while delivering a stillborn child (instead of the musical prodigy that Nicolo had counted on), the violin begins a journey that spans three centuries and as many continents. Setting aside the two competing frame narratives for the moment, the film is divided into an Italian section (the making of the violin), a German section (how the violin finds its way into the hands of an orphan at a German monastery), a French section (in which the orphan's teacher attempts to impose la francais on the boy), an English section (in which the violin is played by England's one and only musical prodigy, a man named Pope), a Chinese section (during Mao's rise to power, at a time when Western influences are being purged), and a Canadian section (involving high-tech research that identifies the violin and prepares us for its theft).

Although I suppose there are two dozen people on the planet who could watch this polyglot film without the assistance of subtitles, it is rather remarkable to watch a film in which we become so used to reading subtitles that we don't even notice that we're listening rather than reading when the film makes it back to our own language. I suppose there is something globally affirmative to be said for the fact that somewhere in Taiwan there is a viewer who no more noticed the film's plunge into Chinese than I noticed its plunge into English. But I would be the last person to recommend a film simply because it takes a refreshing approach toward global consciousness. I recommend this film because it is, to my mind, a formal masterpiece.

I want to start in the middle, with the plaintive story of an orphan who has a weak heart and a natural talent for the violin. A tutor named Georges Poussin (Jean-Luc Bideau) is summoned by monks to listen to the boy and evaluate his talent. Impressed, he decides to train the child and present him at the Viennese court. But even though he finds the boy's playing nothing short of captivating, he insists on finessing it, tweaking it, 'fiddling' with it. Although the poor child only speaks German, Poussin almost invariably speaks to him in French, which confounds, intimidates, and sometimes terrifies the child. When Antoinette Poussin (Clothilde Mollet) asks her husband why it is so important for the child to learn to speak French, he replies nastily, "Because I want them to know who his teacher was."

This is the point at which the film comments most scathingly on our desire--perhaps our need--to stamp the things that we love with our signatures, even if it means changing what we love most about them. Poussin, who is not without compassion, pushes the orphan (whose heart condition he was warned about by the monks) too hard and too fast. When the boy auditions for a member of the nobility, he dies before getting out a single note.

And now allow me to backtrack to the beginning, which sets up the two frame narratives that will compete for control of the film. The first framing device involves the auction through which the value of the violin is made clear by the price that people will pay for it. Long before we hear the first note of the violin, we learn that the bidding starts at $250,000. Interestingly, the man who once owned the violin in Communist China (where it was outlawed along with the Western idea of Capitalism for which it stood) is the only person bidding on the violin who wants to hear it. He does not want it because all of the laboratory tests have confirmed that it is the famed red violin. He wants it because of what it meant, personally, to him.

This financial perspective on the violin speaks to the mathematical rigidity that is inherent in chord structures and the diatonic scale. It's true that music is, viewed from one perspective, the ultra-rational, ultra-mathematical art. But music is also passionate in a way that equations usually aren't. Even Bach's most numerically inflected fugues still speak to us with emotion. And the passion of music is represented through a second frame narrative, the narrative of a tarot reading to which Anna Bussotti is initially afraid to subject herself. The fortune teller begins with such transparent formulations as, "I see a journey ahead--and danger." And at first we may suspect that the film is going to ridicule the emotional/passionate/mystical side of the musical equation. Anna appears to be a twit simply for listening to the ramblings of a fortune teller who announces that she will "pretend not to see the bad parts" so clumsily that she would be an embarrassment to Miss Cleo and the other 'clairvoyants' who work for the Psychic Network.

But the future outlined in the Tarot reading applies, as we learn almost immediately, to the red violin rather than Anna Bussotti. So our suspicions are alerted to the fact that somehow Anna's future is fused with that of the violin. But why would that be? And is the answer to be found in the color of the instrument? Did Bussotti choose to coat the violin in a red varnish as a symbol for the blood of his wife and unborn child? Perhaps these are the most important questions that the film answers (all of them satisfyingly, if a bit predictably).

The most important question that it raises, however, is how the violin, being so closely related to the guitar, can be played with a sense of suggestion so entirely unlike that of a guitar. When Pete Townshend tears into his crotch-level Stratocaster with a windmill action, the masturbatory overtones are painfully and inescapably obvious. But when Frederick Pope (Jason Flemyng) plays the violin, his face practically buried in the strings that he is plucking, the cunnilingual resonances are hard to miss. What's more, they're hot. The first genuinely interesting love scene that I have seen in years occurs between Pope and his lover, Victoria Byrd (Greta Scacchi), as Pope seeks 'inspiration' from her on his 'instrument.' He never puts the violin down.

The film ends perfectly, with a copy of the violin in the hands of a man who couldn't have appreciated it anyway--and the violin itself on its way to a child who will love it and learn from it as the gift that it was always meant to be, the gift of a father who appreciates it. I can't praise the acting of the five different casts involved in the film highly enough. There are stunningly solid performances at every turn from this international cast. But for the acting to be anything less than perfect would have been an insult to a script so brilliantly thought out, so tensely balanced, so remarkably engaging and patient, so justifiably sure of itself.

Savor this film.


Recommended: Yes