The Red Violin

In Brief: The so-called portmanteau film — a collection of stories in a single vessel — is by its very nature a tricky proposition. Even the best of them — Julien Duvivier’s Tales of Manhattan (1942), the multidirector Dead of Night (1945) — rise and fall on the quality of the individual episodes. Duvivier’s film, for example, soars in its Edward G. Robinson sequence and again in its Paul Robeson/Ethel Waters vignette but plummets somewhere beneath sea level in the story with Ginger Rogers and Henry Fonda. French-Canadian filmmaker François Girard and co-screenwriter Don McKellar mostly circumvent this problem in the 1998 film, The Red Violin. It’s not simply that there’s no actual clunker of a story in the film’s mix (there isn’t); it’s more that they fashioned not one, but two brilliantly conceived and executed framing stories to tie the whole thing together. And it’s a good thing they did, because this may be the most ambitious portmanteau film ever made. This excerpt was taken from a review by Ken Hanke published on Oct. 6, 2004.