"I had no intention of becoming Mr. Music," Francois Girard replied when
asked why he went from "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould," through several
concert films and directing the Canadian Opera Company in a Stravinsky
doubleheader, to "The Red Violin," soon to be released in the U.S.
"I was actually resisting the idea of doing another film that was so
closely connected to music, but you fall in love with an idea and then
you just have to do it."
The 36-year-old Quebec-born director has just hit San Francisco on the
promotion circuit. He looks uncannily like another Francois, Truffaut, but
Truffaut at 25. (Don't miss his new biography, just published in English.)
Intense, focussed, a brilliant communicator who responds to questions on
several levels simultaneously, Girard talks about both his involvement with
music and the relationship between music and film:
"Consciously or not, every film-maker is fascinated by music. Making
films is making music, whether you want it or not -- structuring,
emotions in time, connecting them in structural patterns, and describing
a world words might not be able to describe.
"Cinema is also music: it's a composite of all the other arts. It's
the oldest marriage. Cinema spoke music before it spoke words.
"I am not a trained musician, far from it, I have no official
competence. I am a music lover. Music is a language I love and
understand better than English or even French. It's a powerful world
which I like to dive into, but I never had any pretension or presumption
of being a music expert or musician."
Girard brushes aside the question about going from the very "small" Gould
documentary to the "Gone With the Wind" scenic adventure genre of "The Red
Violin."
"For me the size factor was not at all important. It does have a
number of implications, in time, in money, in logistics. But for
the essential product, for it means to me, to the audience, size
doesn't matter. Whether you have 450 extras in the background [which
"Violin" does, often] or not, it's all the same problem when it comes
to the essence of making a movie."
"Violin" is huge. Two and a half hours, two centuries, a dozen countries
and languages, ranging from a court in Vienna to the Chinese Cultural
Revolution in full fury -- all in tracing the life of a fictional violin
made in the 18th century.
It's a quintet ("I wanted an odd number, and three were too few, seven
too many, so I settled on something like a five-act play," Girard says),
with a fortune-teller's prediction at the birth of the violin and the
contemporary auction of it repeated at the opening of each "act."
Theme-and-variations may work a lot better in music: here, the device
becomes tiresome quickly.
With an interesting story line but a stilted, predictable delivery,
"Violin" is vastly enhanced by Joshua Bell and the Salonen-directed
Philharmonia playing through the film brilliantly,
"The Red Violin" is very much a must-see for music lovers and fans of
big-spectacle films, but chances are you will come away from it wishing for
something more of one piece, something speaking intelligently and trusting
the audience more as its director does in life, not the way he shaped the
movie.
Other than Samuel L. Jackson (who is quite dreadful, almost as bad as he
is "Phantom Menace"), there are no recognizable names in the multi-national
cast... not for a non-Canadian anyway.
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