| [Date Prev] | [Date Next] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] |
| [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Author Index] | [Subject Index] |
Review of The Red
Violin
by Peter Haggart – March 2000
This year The Kenworthy Performing Arts Center will give film fans a chance to see some films that never made it to the Palouse last year. The series starts with The Red Violin, a grand epic about a fabled violin that changes hands and lives over the course of three centuries. The film illustrates important chapters in the violin's history, from its creation in seventeenth-century Italy, to Imperial Vienna in 1790, to Victorian England in the late 1800s, to China in the mid-1960s, and, finally, to an auction house in Montreal. The Red Violin is a splendid story that spans five countries, four languages, and more than three hundred years of history and cultural change. These sequences, each evoking a different musical style, from Baroque to modern, combine to tell a tale filled with poetry, pageantry, tragedy, romance, adventure, and mystery.
I was swept away by the film. The cinematography is outstanding and the production design gives the film an authenticity for every place the violin pauses on its way from its creation in a workshop in Cremona, Italy in 1681 to its sale at a Montreal auction house over 300 years later. The largely unknown and unheralded cast does an excellent job in guiding us through this journey. And, always in the background, is the question of how the violin got its red color and its passionate voice. The answer is as rewarding as the journey.
Music, and the solo violin in particular, are obviously at the heart of this film. That heart beats fervently and the audience is rewarded with an academy award winning original musical score and exquisite solo violin voice. My son said this film was the best film he had seen in 1999. I cannot be as generous as he, but this film certainly brightened my film viewing last year. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert wrote “The Red Violin has the kind of sweep and vision that we identify with elegant features from decades ago – films that followed a story thread from one character to another . . . There really is a little something here for everyone: music and culture, politics and passion, crime and intrigue, history . . .” San Francisco Examiner film critic Edvins Beitiks wrote, “The best word to describe the new film from director François Girard, is beautiful. Simply beautiful.”
The Red Violin will be shown at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Center. Call 882-1178 for details.