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I finally see one real movie this summer. I mean, a real movie, a production of Cinematic Art, not some box-office addict.
One thing I love the most about this film is that it did not rely too heavily on music, as most of the movies about music did. This one is simply the storytelling, a story about the divine instrument and the passion, time, love, hate, and people. It's always amazed me the most not the Art itself, but the stories behind. I must confess, after finishing the movie, I walked out of the theatre with the great sense of regret of my giving up playing piano all those years ago. I hate the music then, because I couldn't understand why I should routinely spend one hour a day to play the piano and listened to the teacher scream at me. Later I heard about some professional piano players practice 7,8,9 hours a day and found it unbelievable. It's that perfection and passion we should be looking for. And passion, above all, I believe is the essential element present in any form of Art. And that's what this movie is.
This movie can really be summarized as a commentary on how lust can have disastrous effects on it's "victims". The violin is a symbol - it could just as easily be a woman, and how she brought out the worst in people; however, because we are dealing with an inanimate object, we have the luxury of following it through many lifetimes.
When I first read reviews on this movie, I was worried that the "jumping around" in time that takes place would detract from my enjoyment. I must say that the "jumping around" is an essential device in this case, each part of the story making more sense as you see other parts.
Expertly filmed, and one of the rare music movies, where it really appeared as if the actors were actually playing the instrument.
The Red Violin" is a fine, beautifully crafted film that follows the life of a rare Italian violin as it bears witness to the lives of various unrelated people who come in contact with it throughout the centuries. Through these characters, we explore the universal human propensities for fear, passion, jealousy, love, greed, oppression and survival in even the most dire of circumstances. Like many anthology films, "The Red Violin" loses some of its emotional force through the fact that the characters, by their very nature, cannot be fully developed and therefore tend a bit toward "type". However, each segment is so lovingly created in terms of setting, costume and cinematography, that the viewer is drawn into the many worlds the film creates. The most impressive part of the film is the brilliant overlapping time structure that is remarkably complex and creates a tremendous amount of excitement and tension in the last half hour of the film when all the elements from the various narrative skeins are pulled together to reveal the whole picture. In fact, the last half hour, in which the violin is restored and the man in charge (played by Samuel L.
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