Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2826 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-05-20
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English, French, German, Italian
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 130 minutes

Amazon.com
Mounted in high lavish style, from the opening strains to coda, The Red Violin pays homage to the careful uses of color and composition without bothering to support these qualities with any real substance. Oh, it's a class act on the surface all the way, while failing on nearly every other level to convince. The story tells the story, revealing precious little else. The 17th-century Cremonese instrument-maker Niccolo Bussotti finishes his final violin with a curious red varnish, the secret of which spans the film, yet will come as a surprise only to the very sleepy. The odd voyage of this unique violin through history is then explored from one episode to the next, from child prodigy to gypsies to Victorian virtuoso to a clandestine enclave of art lovers in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. This is all framed by the violin's rediscovery in present day by instrument appraiser Charles Morritz (Samuel L. Jackson), for whom the perfect instrument strikes a resonant chord. The main scheme of the film, an object connecting a number of seemingly disparate stories, has been used many times, most notably in Max Ophuls's La Ronde. But while this approach is employed elsewhere to cause one scene to reverberate against another, The Red Violin is content to leave each episode thematically unconnected with any of the others. On the decorative level, the film may satisfy many viewers with its sensuous attention to tone and detail, as well as its eclectic and expertly performed score. But as narrative it is very slight. Just pierce the pretty crust of this puff pastry and gaze in wonder at the pocket of air within. --Jim Gay

From The New Yorker
Joshua Bell's impassioned violin soars above a dark matting of strings in John Corigliano's soundtrack score-the most valuable element to emerge from this grandiose French-Canadian movie project. In form, it's an omnibus film that chronicles, in three historical vignettes, a prologue, and an epilogue, the life of a great violin made in Cremona in the late seventeenth century. A small boy in eighteenth-century Austria, an English nineteenth-century violin virtuoso who has sex and plays wildly at the same time (quite a trick), and an isolated lover of Western music during China's Cultural Revolution are all touched by the violin's powers. But is the instrument cursed or blessed? A glory or a menace? The director-screenwriter team, François Girard and Don McKellar, don't seem to have worked out a coherent idea of what the violin means, and when they try to tie things together, in a modern auction-house scene in which representatives of the earlier owners of the violin come together and bid on the instrument, we don't care who gets the violin or why. The style of the movie veers unsuccessfully between humorless piety and opéra-bouffe clownishness. With Samuel L. Jackson as a canny rare-instrument specialist who has his own plans for the fiddle. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

One of the finest film scores out there.
With this outstanding score, John Corigliano emerges as one of the finest film composers to be found.

A MUST SEE
I believe this movie was a sleeper - a real blockbuster that no one heard about. I think this is another one of my top favorites of all time. There wasn't a dull or sleepy moment throughout the entire movie. It was fascinating and interesting as the violin traveled through time and the ending made me laugh and squeal with delight. The only thing I had a problem with was knowing he was taking a multimillion dollar violin home to his kid. That almost gave me a heart attack. Besides that, it is a movie that I have watched again and again. It is always thrilling and fun to watch.

The Red Violin DVD
I received a new copy of The Red Violin. It arrived in a timely manner and was in, the as discribed condition.