The Red Violin

A famous violin is up for auction, the last one made by its creator, and the film traces the history of the violin. It drifts to a monastery, to the Roma people for several generations, to some Victorian badboy musician, to a young woman who has to hide it because she's in Communist China and Mao's not having any of that decadent Western music.

All this is tied together by two threads. One, a woman telling divining the future of the violin's creator's pregnant wife. The other is that someone connected to each stop the violin made along the way is there trying to acquire it. Each time a vignette ends, we return to the beginning of the bid with someone else present.

There's also a whole thing with Samuel L. Jackson showing up at the auction. In theory, I don't think you're supposed to know what role he's going to play. In reality, it was obvious immediately what he was there to do. That doesn't make it a bad direction to go, but if they were counting on that to be a big deal or surprise, it doesn't work. Although I wish they'd have gotten on with it a little faster once the movie shifted to focus solely on that. When you know what's coming, all the preamble and build can get tedious, especially when there doesn't appear to be some clever trick to how it'll happen.

The thing that was odd to me is that the violin keeps finding its way to children. At the monastery, the Romany pass it down to many children, again when it ends up in China, again at the very end. This does make perfect sense in the context of the movie, so that's not what's odd. The part I can't figure is the bit with the English musician, Pope, whose actor looks like he wouldn't have been out of place in A Clockwork Orange. He's an allegedly grown-ass man, not a kid. I'd say that was why things end badly for him, it isn't meant for one like him, but things end badly for a lot of the children that get it, too. So that doesn't seem like the problem.