Why a mysterious violin piqued my interest, I can't tell you.
The movie, though, was pretty awesome. At least I found it pretty cool and enjoyable. The star was a violin, the famed last violin from a fictitious Busotti ,one of the Italian makers in Cremona (where Stradivarius worked)(in fact Busotti was a direct contemporary of Stradivarius). The story is framed by an auction in the present day and a tarot reading in Cremona, and the violin's long history populates the folks vying at the crying of the night's last lot.
The instrument's maker runs a workshop environment, and is a force. His wife is pregnant and has her fortune read by a servant, but becomes nervous about the nearing birth. The maker brings out a special violin, a perfect violin, that will be a present for his child, one he is sure will be a boy. This is 1681.
After a tragedy, we see the violin get a super red varnish, and become called the Red Violin, a thing people in the violin industry in the movie's present day know of as a mythical musical instrument (it's somewhat based on the Red Mendelsson, a specific Stradivarius violin).
This perfect violin gets gifted to a monastery where it's played by orphans for a hundred years before a weak and sickly child turns out to be a prodigy, and is taken to Vienna in an attempt to sell him off to one of the artsy Hapsburg creeps. After more tragedy, the trainer, mesmerized (like everyone who come into contact with the Red Violin), wants it to sell the violin, at least, and try and make up some of the money he lost on training the boy. This takes place after the French Revolution.
I don't want to really go into details over every stop for the violin, but I do want to say something about the languages spoken and the violin playing.
In the period spots, I liked very much that the language was relative and accurate. In Cremona in the 1680s everybody spoke Italian. In the 1790s in Vienna everybody spoke German, except the violin teacher, who was French and spoke only it at home, forcing the kid to learn French (the trainer was a royalist supporter in the revolution and had few friends in Vienna, and less back home). There's a scene with gypsies, and they speak Romany, the Indian sub-continent language of their origin; and a tense scene during Cultural Revolution in China is all in Chinese. It makes sense, for sure.
I think one of the reasons the filmmakers went ahead and did the languages accurately and subtitled it is because it was a French-Canadian production, and subtitles are a way of life.
The playing of a violin: Wow. Okay, I guess I'm a novice when it comes to classical instruments and the magical sound experts can regularly make them emit. Well, I'm a novice with most musical instruments. One guy, Joshua Bell, played all of the solos, and apparently is a modern master player.
The violin market, apparently, for the super-dooper violinists, is apparently made up of instruments made by a handful of guys from the years between 1650 and 1750. Prices range in the millions of dollars. Like, uh, I just bought this violin at auction for 2.7 million bucks, and I think I'll sell it when that (points to a different violin in a magazine/concert-photo) becomes available for sale. The histories for these instruments is almost as colorful as the movie, as many of the Stradivarius' exist and have been stolen, multiple times for many of them.
Now, if anyone has seen the movie, or plans on seeing it, see if you come to the same conclusion I did. Also, I guess what follows is a SPOILER. Samuel Jackson plays a collector and appraiser of violins, and is equally mesmerized by the Red Violin. He has a hunch that it is the famed Red Violin. He takes some of the red varnish for testing, and it turns out to be blood. That's what makes it red. Busetti made an applicator from his dead wife's hair, and used her blood. It's never explicitly said about what happened to the baby. Samuel Jackson's character get's in trouble for ordering so many tests, including DNA tests.
He ends up stealing the violin (something I called in the first few minutes), and calls his daughter on the ride to the airport telling her he's got something special for her.
I filled in the reasons that the movie skips. DNA tests are comparative. I think Busetti's wife was nervous for reasons other than her bad reading. I think she knew Busetti wasn't the dad, and that she'd been knocked up by a Moor. She died giving birth to a black baby, and her mitochondrial DNA was traced all the way down to Samuel Jackson's character---he's a descendant of the blood on the violin. That's my conjecture. He calls his daughter about it because she'll have the same MT DNA.
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