Atom Egoyan getting you down? Still don't entirely get the Cronenbergian talking cockroaches and flesh-guns? Then The Red Violin may be right for you! As something of an combination of haughty and lazy, The Red Violin goes through all the motions of having a complex storyline, well-structured characters and sophisticated manner without actually having any. While it can be described as Canadian Art House cinema's nice but dim cousin I argue, why, dear reader, must we push ourselves to view excellence when we can watch something easier that pretends to be?
Written and directed by Francois Girard (32 Short Films About Glen Gould) and co-written by the ever-omniscient Don McKellar, The Red Violin follows a violin over three centuries as it falls into the hands of several different characters, each from different countries and cultural backgrounds. Tying these storylines together are subplots involving a 16th century tarot-card reading and a present-day auctioning off of the now legendary violin, spread throughout the film with contrapuntal-like editing.
The strengths of the movie are obvious: painstaking cinematography, award-winning score, SAMUEL L. JACKSON. Unfortunately, the rest is all a bit ordinary, for two reasons: 1. It's not quite long enough; each sequence is far too short to seem anything but stilted, and each character lacks in both dimension and likeability directly because of their lack of screen time. 2. But possibly more importantly, it's not quite sure what kind of film it wants to be; it's not quite creative or interesting enough to be high brow and it's not quite structurally lazy and oversimplified to only be an average costume drama.
Oddly, what makes this film interesting in comparison to the standard critical Canadian hits is just how middling it is. Because unlike radio and television there is no Canadian content regulation for cinemas, films shown are largely US blockbusters, causing most Canadian films to be utterly impervious to mainstream Canada. This results in having nearly all Canadian films bound to film-fest-types only, with the odd exception: an obvious problem for an emerging industry. But The Red Violin did surprisingly well for a film with much less critical acclaim than the likes of critical darling The Sweet Hereafter, yet it brought in a whopping near-ten million dollars, five million dollars more than Hereafter (although a paltry amount in comparison to the 1970's Canadian hit "Meatballs" which racked in $43,000,000) While The Red Violin is utterly dumbed-down art aesthetic, this directly influences its total watchability and that unfortunately is a step in the right direction for Canadian cinema. 4.5 Suck out of 10
