Violin Maker

From 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould to five short films about a red violin, François Girard has been pushing avant-garde techniques into the mainstream, telling conventional stories in unconventional fashions. From a fragmented biography of the famously eccentric Canadian pianist, Girard has moved to The Red Violin (opening Friday), which follows a hand-crafted instrument through three centuries and across five countries, leaving both inspiration and destruction in its wake.

In town to open the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema this April, Girard cautioned against linking the two films’ structures. "32 Short Films," he points out, "is actually one film pretending to be 32. It’s quite a conventional biopic in a way; it has a three-act structure, turning points, all that crap." By contrast, he says, The Red Violin is "five films that pretend to be one." The film is more grandiose than the movie that first won the director attention outside his native Canada, and perhaps because it has no real-life subject to anchor it, tends to lose itself down technical culs-de-sac. But placed alongside 32 Short Films, it illuminates the ongoing career of a filmmaker whose concerns subtly but indelibly mark each film.

More than the obvious similarities of structure or musical subject matter, what unites The Red Violin with 32 Short Films is a profound sense of loneliness. Gould, Girard points out, was as a Canadian "obsessed with the immensity of the country, the notion of the unreachable north." So too the red violin remains sought after but unattainable for much of the new film, and those who, briefly, do possess it find it does not bring what they expected.

For Girard, the most important link between the two films is the exploration of "the limit between life and death, the traces you leave behind after you die." The Arctic plains of Canada or the global distance of The Red Violin serve as a metaphor for the distance between this world and the next, and as a reminder of the vast terrain that lies between.

Calling himself "a cousin, not a brother" to the Toronto-centered Canadian film community that includes David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Sarah Polley, Callum Keith Rennie and Red Violin co-screenwriter Don McKellar, Girard seems content to be somewhat of an outsider. Before he began his career as a filmmaker, he says he never left French-speaking Canada, and still makes his home in the bilingual city of Montréal, the location of The Red Violin’s climactic story. Set at an auction house where the world’s priciest instruments are being sold to the highest bidder, the story might seem more logically set in New York or London, both of which were considered, but Girard says the story only clicked when he moved the action to Montréal. "I had to ask myself where the violin ends up, and the answer is simple. It ends up at home."

—Sam Adams