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Recently I watched a very beautiful and riveting film known as “The Red Violin.” The film is a fantastic movie that made me stick behind my biggest bias ever, which I blurted out at the end of the film, calmly stating, “They don’t make’em like they used to.” Of course that was improper grammar but I’m trying to illustrate a point to my rambling so the analysis can be more understandable, or at least more entertaining. My point is that this film captured the essence of what Hollywood has strayed away from which, in my opinion, that movies can be so much more than a synthetic copy pasted on a thousand sheets of paper, and that is what this movie was.
The opening scene to this movie is beautiful as the camera almost depicts that of a series of renaissance like paintings flashing before the eyes. The camera pans towards the right showing the workers in a violin shop tediously at work, but each few seconds something obstructs the viewer’s vision so that they only see part of the shop. Doing this the viewer can observe each “painting” that has been put together. This act done by the director is a simply marvelous technique. The next few scenes depict another important element, which is the lighting. When watching this film, the viewer must pay close attention to this reoccurring theme of red within the lighting. Each story seems to have a small amount of red overlay to give an illusion of past events, and to give an illusion of how much more important the color red is compared to any other.
I think it is time to leave the opening scenes alone and focus on the film as a whole. The film uses violins as its background and foreground music, to help convey the importance of the violin, and how for the most part is the main character. (On a side note it is strange that one’s first impression of the violin being the main character would be silly, but if it is thoroughly thought over, the violin speaks through its players, travels the world, and influences the lives of different people. Anyways, I seem to have gotten off track.) One powerful scene is where the music is used to set the uneasy mood after Bossotti’s wife passes away. The scene begins with no music, pure silence, and Bossotti mourning his wife’s death. Bossotti then looks to the side and picks up his master piece, the violin. Then he picks up his brush and starts to cover it in varnish. As he begins to stroke you hear a violin being played, matching the brush strokes. Here the director found a way to incorporate the strokes of the violin to Bossotti’s brush strokes to depict an artistic correlation.
The entire movie seems to be homage to art in general and its importance to society. When I think back to films portrayed in the 1990s, many seemed to portray absurd amounts of action and lose dialogue with the hero saying something cheesy after killing the villain, like, “It’s just been revoked!” I like to think that society is much more than that depiction of the muscle-bound protagonist with enough guns to take over a small foreign nation. Movies that are truly masterpieces are the ones that can utilize an interesting story along with artistic elements. In my opinion the filmmakers and actors of today need to take holiday and research the greater faces of Hollywood. Where have the Carry Grants gone to? Where are the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaires of our time? Where are the Hitchcocks? I believe this film shows a great understanding of film and art in a correlation and how it is okay to mix the two, just like how it is okay to mix peanut butter with chocolate.