BEFORE: It's the first day of fall, which means a few things - it's time to go buy some big bags of cheap candy at the store, because Halloween is right around the corner, and it's time to trim back the facial hair I've been growing for the last week to create my autumn goatee. Hey, some people rake leaves, I start shaving part of my face instead of the whole thing. And it's time to set myself up for horror movies, which I'll start watching on October 1. I've already watched 5 movies this year with Samuel L. Jackson, and another carefully chosen 6 are going to get me to the start of the horror chain. At that point I'll discuss my rationale for choosing the films for this year's Creature Features.
Today, Sandra Oh carries over again from "Mulan 2". Hey, even the musical instruments around here seem to be turning to fall colors....
THE PLOT: A perfect red-colored violin inspires passion, making its way over three centuries through several owners and countries, eventually ending up at an auction where it may find a new owner.
AFTER: I avoided this film for many years, because the subject matter just didn't seem to interest me - so a violin gets passed around for a few hundred years, who cares? But at some point maybe a year ago I put it on the watchlist, what the hell - maybe it was a slow week on the premium channels and I took a gamble. But a story that's set on three different continents, which a diverse cast that includes Chinese, French and Italian actors - that became quite difficult to link to. My options very quickly became narrowed down to hiding it between two films with Samuel L. Jackson, or to do what I did, link from Sandra Oh into an SLJ chain. At least putting it next to "Mulan 2" created some thematic continuity, with both films at least partially set in China.
But for me, that was the weakest of the story settings seen here, because I don't understand a damn thing about the Cultural Revolution in 1960's China (Sorry, I guess in their calendar that would be the 4,660's) or Chairman Mao, or let's face it, Communist China in general. Wikipedia is no help, because all it tells me is that the movement's goal was to preserve true Communist ideology (I have no idea what that entails), to re-impose Mao Zedong thought (again, please explain further) and removed revisionists and bourgeois elements that had infiltrated that society and... sorry, I fell asleep for a minute there. That tends to happen when I try to understand complex world history. It just seems like what took place there is all about an egotistical dictator trying to impose his personal beliefs on an entire country, forcing the people to say how great he is, and everyone then arguing about whether he has the right to do that. Hell, if I wanted to see that, I'd just watch the news.
I didn't quite understand what the Communists had against violins, and people who taught classical music. Somehow the violin was a symbol of Western ideology? I'm not seeing the connection - so this seemed rather contrived. Again, not an expert on Communist China or the Cultural Revolution, but something tells me it wasn't about violins. Violence, maybe, but not violins. Come on, was local Chinese music so freaking great that they had to toss out all their Beethoven records? What about Tchaikovsky, wasn't he Russian? And Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov? Unless the intent was to show how random and arbitrary the new cultural rules in China were when they were imposed, I'm just not following here.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here, the story of the violin really starts in 1681 in Cremona, when a violin maker's wife is expecting their first child, while at the same time he not only crafts the "perfect" violin (and I'm not sure how he knows this, or what the judging standards are) and decides to save it for his son, who will no doubt grow up to become a famous musician. How could he not, with a violin maker for a father? Because throughout history, no teens have ever rejected what their parents stand for... His wife, fearing the impending birth, asks a servant to tell her fortune, and the reading of the tarot cards becomes another framing device for the story - because one framing device is never enough, right? Actually, two seems like one too many here.
Tragedy strikes, however, and the violin-maker finishes the "perfect" violin, only with a different attitude as before. Tragedy in fact strikes again and again, to the people who own the violin in other time periods, but the film falls short of suggesting that the instrument is cursed, or just plain bad luck. Eventually we learn that it's possible that the servant is predicting the fortune of the violin instead of the wife, because it ends up going on long journeys, meeting tall, dark strangers and all of that. There is in fact a connection between the wife and the violin, but it's not revealed until much later in the film.
Meanwhile the violin gets donated to an orphanage in Vienna, where the children are allowed to engage in activities such as playing chamber music, and that's about it. OK, maybe staring at the walls and eating moldy cheese, but those are not really activities. The violin is passed from one orphan to another (we're not sure if they keep getting adopted, aging out of the program, or just dying from despair) until one of its players becomes a real child prodigy, and gets adopted by a man looking for the next Mozart, he's sort of like the Phil Spector or Dina Lohan of 1793. And things go really well, right up until they don't. (This becomes a common theme down through the centuries - everything eventually turns to crap.)
After a long period of time roving with the Gypsies, the violin makes its way to Oxford in the U.K., where a troubled but charismatic composer/violinist uses it to charm audiences with passionate pieces, and if you thought the young boy in Vienna was weird for sleeping next to his violin, this guy likes to play it while making love to his girlfriend, which I think essentially counts as a three-way. His lover, however, needs to travel to Russia while she researches a novel, so there's a long period of separation - bear in mind this guy's like a rock-star of the 1890's, and they never claimed they were going to be exclusive, so what, was he not supposed to "play the violin" while she was gone? You knew the risks, honey. Anyway, in a jealous rage, she shoots the party she deems responsible for his cheating - unfortunately, that's the violin. Now, if this WERE a story about a possessed violin, or a violin that convinces other people to make them do bad things, she'd be 100% on the right track here.
The composer's Chinese servant carries the violin with him all the way to Shanghai, which seems like a bit of a stretch. It then spends 40 or 50 years in an antique dealer's shop, which represents a long wait for something interesting to happen in China. Yeah, that seems about right. The young girl who plays the violin in the 1930's grows up to be a participant in the Cultural Revolution, which as stated before, is not possible to understand, so it's best to just move on here.
Finally, we catch up with the violin in Montreal in 1997, where Samuel L. Jackson is hired to appraise the value of a collection of Chinese violins that is being auctioned, and he just HAPPENS to know about the legendary red violin, and somehow also deduces some of the historical occurrences that it survived, as if it's the Forrest Gump of string instruments. I'm not sure what's the most unbelievable part of this segment, unless it's Samuel L. Jackson being cast as an expert on violin varnishes. And when we see the auction scenes for the 18th time, everything comes into focus - THAT bidder is probably descended from the Austrian guy, THAT bidder represents the descendants of the Oxford guy, and so on. But again, so what?
Showing the auction scene so many times throughout the film is a huge narrative cheat. OK, so each time we see the scene with fresher eyes, after viewing scenes from the past, and we understand the situation a little better each time, but that's no excuse. The entire scene could have run once, or maybe twice - once at the beginning and then at the end, when we'd understand better who all the characters are and what's really going on BTS - but six times is excessive. At that point it becomes a time-filler, a way to stretch out the film's running time. The audience doesn't gain much more understanding on the fourth viewing, for example, than they had after the third viewing of the same events.
Also starring Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Colm Feore (last seen in "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit"), Monique Mercure (last seen in "Naked Lunch"), Julian Richings (ditto), Don McKellar (last seen in "Where the Truth Lies"), Russell Yuen (last seen in "Arrival"), Remy Girard, Jason Flemyng (last seen in "The Social Network"), Greta Scacchi (last seen in "Emma"), Eva Marie Bryer, Joshua Bell, Christoph Koncz, Jean-Luc Bideau, Clotilde Mollet, Arthur Denberg, Carlo Cecchi, Irene Grazioli, Anita Laurenzi, Samuele Amighetti, Sylvia Chang, Hong Tao, Zifeng Liu, Xio Fei Han
RATING: 5 out of 10 customs agents
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