Product Description

Don Plutarco, his son Genaro and his grandson Lucio live a double life: on one hand they are musicians and humble farmers, on the other they support the campesina peasant guerilla movement's armed efforts against the oppressive government. When the military seizes the village, the rebels flee to the sierra hills, forced to leave behind their stock of ammunition. While the guerillas organize a counter-attack, old Plutarco executes his own plan. He plays up his appearance as a harmless violin player, in order to get into the village and recover the ammunition hidden his corn field. His violin playing charms the army captain, who orders Plutarco to come back daily. Arms and music play a tenuous game of cat-and-mouse which ultimately results in painful betrayal.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30200 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-05-27
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
• Original language: Spanish
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

Review
Songs in the Street, Revolution in the Air: The tiny, tough, sneakily moving film The Violin wears its revolutionary romanticism on its sleeve, not far from its gun. Set amid the mountains of the southern Pacific Coast state of Guerrero, Mexico, home of both touristic pleasures and peasant revolt, it blends fablelike simplicity with documentary touches to tell the story of a near-primordial struggle between the haves and the have-nots. For the three generations of one indigenous family who travel to small, dusty towns, playing their music for coins, the struggle is written on their unsmiling faces and in their plaintive, haunting songs. Shot in black and white, it starts badly in a claustrophobic, darkly lighted space (during an unidentified time), with a soldier having his sadistic way with another man, who whimpers in a chair, his hands tied behind him. The director, Francisco Vargas, thrusts us right in the middle of this awful scene, with the camera close to the ground and behind the victim. We can t see the tortured man s face, but we watch him squirm and hear his moans, along with those of several other restrained men and women. It s a wretched opener in part because Mr. Vargas, who makes his feature debut with this film, doesn t understand that he needs to put his camera, and not just his sympathies, on the side of the victims.Things improve immediately thereafter, as the focus shifts to what looks like the present, and Don Plutarco (Don Ángel Tavira), a resourceful septuagenarian and violinist who, when not farming a patch of land, plays music with his son, Genaro (Gerardo Taracena), and grandson, Lucio (Mario Garibaldi). The film follows the family to a dusty town where no one seems to be in the mood to pay for the music. Although Mr. Vargas s direction sometimes telegraphs information too readily, waving rather than pointing, these scenes unfold with naturalistic restraint. The family exchanges few words as it beds down in the street for the night, eating the tacos that Genaro buys from a vendor. Seated on some steps, Lucio tenderly feeds morsels to a stray dog. Mr. Vargas s unforced realism creates a pleasantly lulling effect (you slip into the family s domestic tranquillity easily), but it also has a strategic function because it makes what happens next all the more unsettling. The family s visit to the town turns out to be more complicated than first appears. While his father and son sleep, Genaro visits a honky-tonk and, after some comically indiscreet hand signals and eye glares, is soon examining a stash of guns in a back room under looming shadows. Somehow the authorities enter, a flurry of noise and action ensues, and Genaro starts running. He doesn t really stop until very late in the film, by which time this gentle guitar player (and the director) has struck a heroic revolutionary pose. Genaro ignites the drama, but Plutarco keeps it going through a series of delicately played and directed interludes involving the grandson, a landowner, a donkey and, finally and startlingly, an army officer with an apparent sentimental streak. Creased by the sun and bowed by the years, Mr. Tavira, an acting novice who was awarded a prize for this performance at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, presents an unassailable moral figure. Mr. Vargas perhaps leans too heavily on the character s earthiness, but in Plutarco you see centuries of oppression and resistance, as well as how some faces form a continuum with the land. This isn t essentialism; rather, it s a visible reminder of the struggle that dates back to the conquistadors and the Aztecs, of the history and the fight that endure. --Manohla Dargis, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Review
Much appreciated by Mexican cineasts, writer-director Francisco Vargas's accomplished first feature The Violin is a solemn, suspenseful, extremely well-shot political drama. This evocation of the 1970s Guerrero peasant revolt has an old-time feel that variously suggests a Soviet silent picture, one of B. Traven's Chiapas stories, and an updated legend from Mexico's revolutionary past. Everything in this battle between downtrodden campesinos and the uniformed military thugs who police them is crisply black-and-white and heavily aestheticized. The Violin's humble subjects are ennobled with chiaroscuro, and their passion is played out in disturbingly beautiful settings. The movie opens on the army torturing captive insurgents in a ramshackle back-country hut that's lit like a cathedral. The protagonist is a wizened, one-handed musician (octogenarian violinist Don Á Tavira) with a face as weathered as a canyon wall and the weighty, classical moniker Plutarco. What is his life? The movie flashes back to Plutarco, his son Genaro (Gerardo Taracena, last seen as one of Mel Gibson's Mayan monsters), and little grandson Lucio as street musicians, playing for pennies in some suitably wretched pueblo as a cover for the fiery Genaro's revolutionary activities. But while Genaro arranges an arms sale in the local cantina, a sordid dive waiting for its Rembrandt, the Mexican Army raids their mountain village torching houses, brutalizing suspects, and sending the inhabitants scurrying for safety in the woods. Genaro manages to reach the guerrilla camp, but Plutarco has another plan, signing away his life to the local padron in exchange for a mule, which he then uses to return to the now-occupied town. Looking for a way to retrieve the weapons that have been buried out in the cornfields, the stoic old man discovers that the commanding officer (Dagoberto Gama) has a genuine love of music and a pathetic desire to become a musician himself. (Suddenly, it might be World War II, with Nazis and Jews.) Playing on the captain's yearning as well as his violin, poker-faced Plutarco engages the brute in a prolonged battle of wits that ultimately takes us back to the grim credit sequence. (A postscript nevertheless demonstrates Vargas's social-realist faith in the future.) The Violin is burdened with a surplus of distractingly artsy close-ups of Tavira, who won an acting award at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and is here often treated as a sort of human objet d'art. The camera angles draw attention to themselves, and the background music has a tendency to turn disconcertingly highfalutin. Still, The Violin is a movie of undeniable gravitas and monumentality even if it is too fond of its own effects. --J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE

Review
The Violin, it's been reliably reported, has won 46 international awards,and it's not hard to see why. The debut dramatic feature by Mexican director Francisco Vargas is a quintessential film festival film, a potent work made with confidence and skill that effectively melds aesthetic and thematic concerns within an involving dramatic framework. As written by Vargas, who won the Mexican Ariel for best screenplay as well as for best first feature, the story of The Violin has the simplicity of a fable, albeit one that is drawn to darkness more than light. Family patriarch Don Plutarco (Ángel Tavira) is not only a farmer, he and his son Genaro (Gerardo Taracena) and his grandson Lucio (Mario Garibaldi) work in a nearby city as itinerant street musicians. Plutarco plays a graceful folk violin even though he lacks a right hand and must use a makeshift arrangement to hold the bow. More than that, however, Plutarco and his family are involved in a ragtag guerrilla insurrection against the military dictatorship that rules the unnamed country they live in. The Violin nervily chooses to open with an uncharacteristically violent scene of torture and rape to let us know at once the horrors that have caused these people to take up arms. The film's main action begins when a surprise government raid takes over Plutarco's village. Theresidents are forced to evacuate so quickly they leave behind a critical cache of ammunition. While the rebels think about counterattacking, Don Plutarco, who believes you have to learn to wait, every thing in its time, begins to play a slow and dangerous game that he hopes will accomplish the same ends. Making this story effective is a performance of enormous gravity and presence by 80-something Tavira, a legendary traditional musician whom filmmaker Vargas made the subject of an earlier documentary feature. Vargas also has a background as a director of photography, and he has given The Violin a stunning look that highlights cinematographer Martin Boege's sparking black-and-white imagery. But one thing that makes this film distinctive is that its visual beauty doesn't keep it from emphasizing the bleak reality of the impoverished lives of its characters. Poverty is written on the faces of many of its participants, and the squalid aspects of existence are not shied away from. More than anything, however, The Violin emphasizes the timeless necessity and even inevitability of rebellion on the part of the disenfranchised. The poor may be overmatched, but, as one character says, our destiny is to fight because the land is ours. A message this political has rarely been delivered in so poetic a form. --Kenneth Turan, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

Customer Reviews

peasant music v. the government military
Don Plutarco Hidalgo is an aging and illiterate peasant farmer, but he still plays the violin with his one good hand. His son plays the guitar and his grandson collects the spare change as they play in restaurants and bars, then sleep on the streets at night. But their real passion is the guerilla movement of other peasants who are resisting the oppressive government. When the army raids, loots and torches their little village, the guerilla movement is stranded in the dense mountain jungles without their cache of weapons. Plutarco borrows a mule and returns to their village, telling the occupying soldiers that he wants to check his crops. At his age, he's able to convince the soldiers, and the commander takes a shine to Plutarco's violin playing. I won't spoil just where that violin takes this powerful film about oppression and liberation, only to say that as the film itself demonstrates, it's the stuff of multi-generational songs sung at peasant campfires. Filmed in black and white, in Spanish with English sub-titles.

One of the Most Amazing Films
Extremely compelling film about an old farmer, Plutarco, and his violin. Joined by his son and grandson, Plutarco travels the countryside playing his music to earn money. When the military takes over the village and prevents Plutarco from returning home, Plutarco strikes up a friendship with the army commander, hoping to charm his way back into the village. Plutarco must return to the village because of a secret he has hidden there.

"The Violin" has become the most awarded Mexican film in history. A must see!

Moving...
This spanish language movie is set in the mountains in the state of Guerrero, Mexico during a revolutionary period where the peasants are attempting to overthrow the army rule and control over the farmlands. Central to the plot are three generations of men - Don Plutarco, the one-hand violin playing grandfather - his son Genaro (plays guitar and a key member of revolution) and the grandson Lucio. The three of them travel from town to town playing music for pennies while the story begins to unfold. While Genaro is active in participating in revolutionary activities, it's Plutarco's music and craftiness which engage a Senior army officer for the benefit of the revolution. The story opens with some brutally violent scenes which immediately take you into its grips - and then gently rocks you back and forth between calm and reflection and tension. The movie is filmed in stunning black and white vistas. The individual characters and hardships are etched in the faces and bodies. This is a slow moving but captivating film - which moves from brutality to poverty and tenderness and back again. Like many great performances, few words are spoken in this film but much is understood. If you liked Grapes of Wrath, you'll likely enjoy this movie which has similar themes of poverty, endurance, struggle. Loved it...