Samuel L. Jackson might be the top-billed actor in this award-winning, Oscar-nominated arthouse flick from 1998, but you’ll be sorely disappointed if you’re expecting him to point an AK at some poor schmo’s head and bellow words to the effect of “All I want from you, motherf**ker, is to give me the motherf**king red violin!” This isn’t that kind of a movie. Crafted with care by the team responsible for the musically inspired 1994 indie hit, “32 Short Films About Glenn Gould,” this Canadian production is filmed in five languages and follows the career of a very special instrument, starting with its creation in 17th century Italy, to Vienna at the height of the classical period, and then to England and the hands of a sex-crazed rock star of a romantic era composer (Jason Flemyng) and his entranced lover (Greta Scacchi). It then moves on to mid-20th century China during the Cultural Revolution, and finally to contemporary Montreal, where a high-end auction house retains an American expert (Jackson, uttering nary a curse word), who finds himself in possession of the perfectly crafted and now legendary instrument.
Each of the tales is visually sumptuous, engagingly melodramatic, extremely well-acted, and not too much more, though a story about a sickly Viennese child prodigy and his conflicted mentor threatens to become poignant. By the time the final tale of possible musical skulduggery is complete, the point is either ridiculously self-evident (“beautiful music and fine workmanship are very powerful and make people do things they otherwise might not”) or something so high-flown I couldn’t quite grasp it. Writer-director Francois Girard and cowriter Don McKeller, who also plays Jackson’s geeky cohort, are a highly talented team, but in this case their work says less about music or the joy and power of craft, than it does about a certain kind of safely entertaining style of tony film-making.
