107.1Abstract (summary)
The Cremona scenes recall how the violin became an object conceived in passion. In his workshop, Bussotti examines the finished violin of an apprentice, and pronounces it adequate for a courtesan or priest -- before smashing it to bits: "Put your anger into your work, my boy." For the master, a violin must be crafted with true feeling, not with the courtesan's fakery or the musical cleric's dilettantism. The open flames in the studio emblematize the genuine artist's passion. Bussotti has been labouring on his masterpiece, a perfect violin for the child in his wife's womb: "He will live for music." But when both mother and baby die Bussotti, in his mad grief, varnishes the violin with his wife's blood, which through the centuries will provide its mysterious hue and voice. In his total dedication to his beloved wife and to his craft, Bussotti (his name a fugitive echo of "besotted") is the film's most heroic character, a man of pure passion both for his art and for his family.
The boy's destructive mentor, George Pussin (Jean-Luc Bideau), is self-aggrandizing, vain, corrupt, foolish -- an anticipation of Ruselsky. His ostensible passion for the art form violates the values of the Red Violin: music, children, and the love that binds them. Like Ruselsky, Pussin loses the Red Violin -- in this case when the monks bury it with Kaspar, "so he can play it in heaven." But the monks' spirituality seems as wasteful and abusive as Pussin's materialism. He imposes his mechanistic system upon Kaspar's instinctive harmony with the instrument and exploits both for his profit. Pussin's pseudo-science (his harsh ped-agogy, his Pussin-metre metronome) denies the power of the Red Violin and its devotee, where the deductive science of appraiser Morritz will later serve to preserve the violin's integrity. There is no indication that the modern monks appreciate the significance of the Red Violin any more than Pussin, but their bidding respects their history.
When Ignatz weighs the government's invitation to run for parliament, Emmanuel reminds him of the Jew's eternal precariousness: "Our people must never climb too high, even when they're invited to." Ignatz may shoot a deer on the aristocrats' hunt -- that most goyish of the men-will-be-boyish rites -- but the Jew is never secure from turning target himself. Ignatz is determined to serve the empire as it serves his ambition; he considers his one brief meeting with the emperor "the most important moment in my life." When Emmanuel and the emperor die on the same day, Ignatz loses both his real and his fancied source of identity. Increasingly alienated from her husband's reactionary views, Valerie eventually leaves him for another man. Ignatz's suppressed emotions finally explode when the distinguished judge rapes his own wife, in a perverse attempt to prevent his marriage from collapsing with the empire. With no sustaining identity left, Ignatz dribbles away his life in bitter rage.
Two masterful epic films that are passionate about passion have found a noble way to be Canadian despite not seeming to be Canadian. The Red Violin and Sunshine eschew the small "our story" characteristic of the purest Canadian cinema for the sweep of an international and historical canvas. Each surveys history with a wide range of characters tied together in myriad ways. But neither film is as intimidating as it sounds; at the root of both stories is a simple desire to rediscover and restore passion and purity in a world of deceit and compromise.
THIS strategy should not be mistaken for the black sell-out days of Meatballs and Porky's, when Canadian films obsessively tried to "pass" as American. Back then, the surest way to identify a film as "Canadian" was the gratuitous shot of the American flag or a reference to "the President" in the first go seconds. Our red mailboxes had to be replaced by American blue so as not to alienate the "domestic" (i.e., the US) audience. At one point the blue-eyed American "star" Robbie Benson was cast as a famous Canadian aboriginal to give the "project" -- Running Brave -- commercial credibility. But in The Red Violin and Sunshine the internationalism derives from strength not insecurity, from the passion of a compelling vision, not commercial expediency. In their post-colo- nized position the films transcend their national particularity instead of hiding it. The telling difference is between project and passion.
The Red Violin, directed by Francois Girard from a script he wrote with Don McKellar, opens in the studio of the seventeenth-century Italian violin-maker Nicolo Bussotti (Carlo Cecchi). After the credits the film shifts to an antique violin auction in present-day Montreal. That is, the violin's heroic conception and history are established before its contemporary context. Establishing historical Europe before our Montreal reminds us that we live in the context of the historic. Throughout the film the narrative returns to that hub -- the Montreal auction -- then flares out to recount the fantastic history of the instrument, each facet of which compels a different modern-day bidder to acquire it. And though each bidder's desire to possess the Red Violin is intense, their motives are of varying degrees of honour. Beneath the auction's tone of courtly, mannered civility Girard establishes the tension between the cool mechanics of business and the genuine ardour of the passionate.
The Cremona scenes recall how the violin became an object conceived in passion. In his workshop, Bussotti examines the finished violin of an apprentice, and pronounces it adequate for a courtesan or priest -- before smashing it to bits: "Put your anger into your work, my boy." For the master, a violin must be crafted with true feeling, not with the courtesan's fakery or the musical cleric's dilettantism. The open flames in the studio emblematize the genuine artist's passion. Bussotti has been labouring on his masterpiece, a perfect violin for the child in his wife's womb: "He will live for music." But when both mother and baby die Bussotti, in his mad grief, varnishes the violin with his wife's blood, which through the centuries will provide its mysterious hue and voice. In his total dedication to his beloved wife and to his craft, Bussotti (his name a fugitive echo of "besotted") is the film's most heroic character, a man of pure passion both for his art and for his family.
Compared to Bussotti, the passions of the later possessors of the Red Violin are pale -- but not without their own particular intensities. None are more ignoble in purpose than Mr Ruselsky (Ireneusz Bogajewicz), who opens the bidding in Montreal and seems destined to own the coveted instrument. A consummate grasping collector, his lust for possession of the famous violin is fuelled by pure (i.e., impure) vanity. Even when he plays the Red Violin, he fails to recognize its special character, a character that has captured the imagination of appraiser Charles Morritz (Samuel L. Jackson). We are heartily relieved when the maestro's arrogance and ignorance allow him to be duped by Morritz, who switches the genuine Red Violin for a copy. And although Morritz takes advantage of his position of trust, breaking the conventional laws governing morality and criminality, he is obeying the personal law of the instrument's creator. Morritz's crime recovers Bussotti's original intention: to dedicate the perfect instrument to one's child. Morritz, played by an actor whose characters are often morally ambivalent, has painstakingly traced the violin's history with a burning devotion reminiscent of Bussotti.
The bodily humours the fortune-teller Cesca (Anita Laurenzi) detects in Bussotti's wife and baby are the qualities we will find in the Red Violin. Bussotti's masterpiece seems to embody his dead family -- both beloved and cursed. Although this humanizes the instrument, the extension of the inanimate into the human implies the demonic as well as the ascendant. The Red Violin becomes legendary for the misery it brings its possessors. Each of Cesca's Tarot cards introduces the tragic theme of one of the violin's historical episodes.
One of the camps in the auction house bidding war is made up of Italian monks who approach the sale via the Internet and bid by phone (as befits the agents of the ethereal); they want the Red Violin because of its connection to their monastery, where during the eigh-teenth century it was the treasured instrument of a series of orphan prodigies. Of the generations of boys who played it, one performer stands out: Kaspar Weiss (Christoph Koncz), an enigmatic mute who bonds with the instrument as intensely as did Bussotti. As the violin becomes Kaspar's surrogate parent, it recaptures Bussotti's passion-ate purpose. In addition to drawing unearthly beauty from the violin, the boy sleeps with it, collapses when it is removed from him, and drops dead at an audition when it appears that his playing might lead to its sale. This fulfils the Tarot's omen of illness.
The boy's destructive mentor, George Pussin (Jean-Luc Bideau), is self-aggrandizing, vain, corrupt, foolish -- an anticipation of Ruselsky. His ostensible passion for the art form violates the values of the Red Violin: music, children, and the love that binds them. Like Ruselsky, Pussin loses the Red Violin -- in this case when the monks bury it with Kaspar, "so he can play it in heaven." But the monks' spirituality seems as wasteful and abusive as Pussin's materialism. He imposes his mechanistic system upon Kaspar's instinctive harmony with the instrument and exploits both for his profit. Pussin's pseudo-science (his harsh ped-agogy, his Pussin-metre metronome) denies the power of the Red Violin and its devotee, where the deductive science of appraiser Morritz will later serve to preserve the violin's integrity. There is no indication that the modern monks appreciate the significance of the Red Violin any more than Pussin, but their bidding respects their history.
After being buried on Kaspar's breast, the Red Violin proves its "Lazarus soul" when it is seized by grave-robbers. The Tarot's warning of "lust and energy across the sea" anticipates the Red Violin's long tenure among a band of gypsies and its subsequent sale to a nineteenth-century Oxford Romantic virtuoso, Frederick Pope (Jason Flemyng). In contrast to Kaspar's filial relationship to the instrument, Frederick plays the violin as his lover warms him up before each of his many recitals. In this nest of Romantic passion, the instrument becomes something of a sex toy, a musical aphrodisiac for the jaded participants.
Pope claims the instrument has revived his lost passion for music, but from the moment he "buys" the violin (taking it in trade from the gypsies who are camped on his land) his relationship to it is corrupted. It becomes the focus of his own power. Pope caresses the beautiful Victoria (Greta Scacchi) with his bow, equating her with the instrument. (Contrast this to Bussotti lovingly caressing his dead wife's arm to urge her blood into his vial of varnish.) Pope lounges in bed with the violin as if it is yet another sexual partner, in contrast to young Kaspar's innocent slumber with it. The playing of the violin is so entwined with Pope and Victoria's physical love that she only has to hear him playing through a door to know that he is with another woman. Catching Pope, a gypsy woman, and the Red Violin in flagrante delicto, Victoria puts a bullet through the much abused musical instrument. In effect, the violin is shot by a jealous lover.
More than a century later on the auction floor, the bidding representative from the Pope Foundation, Nicolas Olsberg (Julian Richings), seems a pale, flustered echo of the ambidextrous, ardent Pope of secular passion. But Nicolas trails wisps of his hero's self importance -- and sexual insecurity. If he doesn't get to the auction he'll be castrated, Nicolas tells an unimpressed cabby.
THE great "trial and condemnation" foretold by Cesca's cards come to realization in Maoist China. The Red Violin has again come to be caught between the duelling passions of greed and art. Pope's houseboy (Stuart Ong) carries the violin back to his home in China, where a pawnbroker (Lidou) -- the eternal Pussin/Ruselksy figure -- plunders its ornamental gems and then sells it to a woman whose young daughter has shown a gift for music. Years later, the daughter Xiang Pei (Sylvia Chang) draws for strength upon her dedication to music against the inhumanity and capricious extremes of the Cultural Revolution. As the Red Guards mount an increasingly fierce campaign against the decadence of Western music, Xiang is betrayed by young Ming (Xio Fei Han), for whom she has played the forbidden instrument as a lesson in humanity. As on the auction floor, the Red Violin only escapes its fate -- in this case a bonfire -- when another instrument is sacrificed in its place.
Joining the others on the bidding floor in Montreal, the adult Ming (Russell Yuen), still struggling to make out the world through his Coke- bottle glasses, bids on the Red Violin to expiate his guilt for the long ago betrayal. Against a social upheaval on the scale of the Cultural Revolution -- where beauty is declared ugliness, values corruption, and human kindness a trap -- the Red Violin stands as a moral constant. And it rekindles Bussotti's familial passion, as Xiang Pei's dedication to the violin binds her love for music to her love for her mother.
The Red Violin explores the nature of passion and identity. Over the centuries, many people play the instrument, but precious few fully fathom the ardour that Bussotti invested in it, or realize what can still be drawn from it. For Morritz's colleague, scientist Evan Williams (co-scriptwriter Don McKellar), the Red Violin is "the single most perfect acoustic machine I have ever seen." If he owned it, he would take it apart to analyze it. But to Morritz it is "the perfect marriage of science and beauty" -- effectively embodying Bussotti and his beloved family. And this centuries-old emotional weight can never be equalled even by those closest to the violin in subsequent generations. Though each of the figures of genuine passion -- Kaspar, Xian Peng, and Morritz -- represents but a single distinct facet of Bussotti's love and anguish, they nobly contrast to the characters who see in the Red Violin only a tool of self-aggrandizement -- Pussin, Ruselsky, perhaps Williams.
Morritz, a testy, driven professional, might well count among the latter were his interests rooted in materialism, like those of his competitors on the auction floor. But despite his suspiciously covert investigations and an urgency that might normally imply greed, Morritz's impulsive decision to replace the original Red Violin with a copy is validated by his plan to give the precious instrument to his daughter. It is the father's love of art and his daughter that makes this gift "something very special," not the $2,400,000 (albeit Canadian) that Mr Ruselsky paid for it. Morritz's theft, because it makes music a loving gift to a child, keeps Bussotti's blessing alive. Only for its abusers does the Red Violin carry a curse.
WHERE The Red Violin explores passions directed outward, Sunshine is concerned with the integrity of sustaining one's identity through antagonistic times. The film follows four generations of the Sonnenschein family in Hungary -- from the promising and secure days of the early twentieth century, through the horrors of world war and Holocaust, Stalinism, the 1956 uprising, and finally the fall of the Iron Curtain and the renewal of family name, identity, and faith. The early frames recount how a young Emmanuel Sonnenschein left his family's shtetl and hiked across country, owning little except his recipe for an herbal elixir. In time, the hard-working young man is able to brew and bottle his elixir, and the public finds it irresistible. Before long, the humble family name is a household word throughout Hungary, and the family's fortune seems secure forever. Sonnenschein, of course, means "sunshine." As the film surveys the cataclysms of twentieth- century European history, members of the family adjust to the changing currents and, for a while, thrive by adapting their values and even their name. But at the end the old family name is restored and a proud identity retrieved from political compromise.
Though the film was directed by the Hungarian master, Istvan Szabo, it was produced by the Hungarian-Canadian Robert Lantos. So in a sense, despite its sweep across Hungarian history, Sunshine tells a Canadian's story of fidelity to one's roots and identity. This film about then and there is also about here and now. There is a particular irony in this 1999 film when, at the New Year's celebration of 1900, the mother Rose (Miriam Margolyes) confidently predicts that "this will be a century of love, tolerance, and happiness." Yeah, right.
British actor Ralph Fiennes portrays three generations of Sonnenschein sons. Besides saving on actors' salaries and challenging a versatile performer with several roles, this multiple casting suggests the familial continuity through three generations of different characters, different times. The continuous actor behind the roles reflects the continuing Sonnenschein across the dark times.
The first, Ignatz, becomes a lawyer, then a judge, then a torn apologist for the monarchy. His brother Gustav (James Frain) is a doctor determined also to cure the body politic with socialism. Ignatz falls in love with his cousin Valerie (Jennifer Ehle), who has been taken in by the family and raised as a sister to the boys. At first, Ignatz is too weak to resist his father's opposition. Patriarch Emmanuel (David De Keyser) was him-self frustrated by his father's ban in his great passion for a cousin. "Want is not a word for us, Ignatz. Wish is human. Want is God." Through the life of his marriage Emmanuel has refused to admit any measure of happiness. But he learns from this loss and wisely accepts his son after the more passionate Valerie leads Ignatz into fatherhood and marriage.
Despite his heroic potential, Ignatz's careerism leaves him severely compromised. A bright young jurist, he is noticed in high places and groomed for high office, but always reminded of the importance of becoming "more Hungarian." In order to qualify for promotion to the Central Court, he is persuaded to conceal his Jewishness. Gustav and Valerie too are anxious to seize the opportunities of a new century, leaving behind what they see as the narrow shtetl world of their ancestors. So the three take a new surname, carefully selecting the Hungarian "Sors." The name denotes destiny, fate, prophecy; that is, they determine to reshape their future by adopting a more socially acceptable identity. Ignatz passionately defends the society that enables the family to assimilate, even though it requires him to suppress his own identity. Against his brother's socialist arguments, he asserts that tolerance and liberalism can be guaranteed only by the benevolent emperor. But in spite of their professional success, the Sors' progressive assimilation wins them only delusions of acceptance.
When Ignatz weighs the government's invitation to run for parliament, Emmanuel reminds him of the Jew's eternal precariousness: "Our people must never climb too high, even when they're invited to." Ignatz may shoot a deer on the aristocrats' hunt -- that most goyish of the men-will-be-boyish rites -- but the Jew is never secure from turning target himself. Ignatz is determined to serve the empire as it serves his ambition; he considers his one brief meeting with the emperor "the most important moment in my life." When Emmanuel and the emperor die on the same day, Ignatz loses both his real and his fancied source of identity. Increasingly alienated from her husband's reactionary views, Valerie eventually leaves him for another man. Ignatz's suppressed emotions finally explode when the distinguished judge rapes his own wife, in a perverse attempt to prevent his marriage from collapsing with the empire. With no sustaining identity left, Ignatz dribbles away his life in bitter rage.
The next generation attempts to find happiness through further assimilation. Ignatz and Valerie's two sons convert to Catholicism in an attempt to do away with all the barriers of anti-Semitism. Adam (Fiennes) ambitiously courts and weds Hannah (Molly Parker), whom he meets at his conversion classes, while brother Istvan marries Greta (Rachel Weisz). In this family of new anomie and rootlessness, Greta seduces Adam, against his will, by taunting him about his fears. Instead of being liberated by love, as was his father (whose youthful naked trysts with Valerie are depicted in a breathtaking sweep of aerial photography), Adam is trapped by his deceitful relationship with his rapacious sister-in-law. Adam has shrugged off his Jewish identity in order to pursue his promising career as a fencer, but as his celebrity grows, so does the dramatic tension between his public and private realities. The national champion's heroic image appears on a postage stamp while Adam skulks his way through his unwanted affair. Throughout this period Adam is shot as a small figure against the giant palaces and sculptures of the alien culture, far from the long-ago splendour in the grass of Ignatz and Valerie.
Like his father, Adam has been presented with a "suggestion" that great things lie ahead if he will only become a bit more Hungarian. In his case, the carrot is a place on the elite military fencing team, the only route to the national team. "Assimilation is the only possible way," he is genially advised by his military mentor (who will later apologize for this misguided advice). After one emotional victory, Adam's coach offers another piece of fatherly advice: "Next time no tears. Rather too Jewish." Again, Jewishness is associated with emotions and truth to one-self, assimilation with falseness and betrayal. For a while, at least, falseness seems to serve Adam well indeed. The pinnacle of his life is reached at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Before the admiring gaze of the fuhrer and row upon row of uniformed National Socialists, Adam wins Hungary the gold medal. Basking in glory, signing autographs for throngs of young Nazis, Adam scorns an American's invitation to come to Boston, and rejects his warning against serving an oppressive regime.
But the day of reckoning is not far off. As the "shared madness" of anti-Semitism gathers, Adam loses his Hungarian redefinition. At first, the family jealously frets over its hard-won place in the mainstream; as the radio announces new restrictions on Jewish life, they hang on the words of the announcer as he enumerates those exempted -- such as national champions. "We're alright," they breathe. But the Sors' delusion once again proves their undoing. Before long, it is too late to flee. While his son Ivan watches, Adam is stripped and beaten in the concentration camp, despite his protestations that he is a Hungarian, a national fencing champion, an Olympic gold medalist for Hungary. His defiant refusal to admit to being "just a Jew" provokes his captors to ever greater acts of savagery. Adam is hung up, hosed down, and left to freeze to death in the snow-covered camp. The ice-caked figure is a powerful summary of a warm, dexterous, and exuberant man frozen out of the world he and his father squandered their souls to enter.
IN the final movement, only the most passionate and idealistic of the older Sors/Sonnenheims have survived: Valerie and Gustav (now regally embodied in Rosemary Harris and John Neville). They alone seem to have inflected their selves (in the name change) without abandoning their values and integrity. Gustav, the old revolutionary who has spent decades as a political exile, tries to help his family and his country pick up the pieces. The couple resumes living together in reduced circumstances but in a golden warmth, reunited with Katya, the family's faithful maid. As Gustav, recalling their childhood, tells his sister/sister-in-law, "The most wonderful thing was waiting to be touched by you, every day." Life is still hard, but hopeful; after all, how can any-thing in the future be worse than the Nazis? Gustav drinks the last drops of the family elixir, which Valerie and Katya then kiss off his lips.
But though Gustav has avoided most of the assimilationist traps that devoured his brother and nephew, his commitment to the Party makes him the unwitting agent for another generation of family misery. When Valerie's grandson Ivan (Fiennes again) returns from the camp, he is a husk of a man, haunted by the memory of having stood among 300 prisoners, dominated by only three armed guards, while his father was humiliated, tortured, and killed. Encouraged by his great uncle, he joins the Party and becomes a special investigator, hunting down the guilty of the previous cycle, in order to expunge what lies within his own tortured conscience. Like his deracinated forefathers, Ivan immerses himself in an alien way of life, in this case Stalinism. Like his father and grandfather, Ivan is helped along by a well-meaning mentor, fellow Jew Andor Knorr (William Hurt), who instils in his young protege a righteous belief that only through Communism can Jews ever be free from the pogrom.
But as the years pass, and the Soviets tighten their control over every aspect of Hungarian life, the Party's inquisitors begin to run short of fascists, collaborators, and other wartime criminals. The Stalinist purge machine requires new enemies -- and who better than the age-old scapegoats of Europe? Suddenly Ivan finds himself a victim of the Party and his own self-delusion, as he is ordered to investigate his friend Andor -- or face investigation himself. His mentor has been named as a "Zionist agent." In his thin glasses and uniform, Ivan Sors, whose grandfather was Jewish and whose father turned Catholic, looks like a Nazi as he subjects his friend to an interrogation that both men know is nothing but grotesque farce.
Consistently in Sunshine, the characters are torn between the heart- felt passion of principle and the chimera passion bred of expediency and compromise. Despite his forefathers' experience, Ivan blunders into the wrong politics, the wrong passions. As each generation of lovers meets and parts in the same coffee house, each generation has been courted primarily for its passion. The wrong-headed invest it in the vicissitudes of politics. After Stalin's death, Knorr is posthumously rehabilitated, but Ivan has already decided to rehabilitate himself. During the 1956 uprising, the former policeman leads an assault on the Russian tanks: "This revolution is not about politics but about morality." Of course, that's what they all say. What's more politic than to plead morality? But this time Ivan's political stance involves tremendous personal risk and sacrifice, and before long he is imprisoned as a counterrevolutionary. "Politics has made a mess of our lives," Valerie observes.
Emerging from a long prison term to rejoin his grandmother and great uncle, Ivan has little to comfort him in the secular world; there is only the slow passage of decades under grim Soviet Bloc hypocrisy, until finally the Communist state wheezes its last. When Gustav dies Valerie hums a Jewish melody, reaching back to the identity the family abandoned so long ago. And finally, Valerie's death leaves Ivan the sole Sonnenschein. And it is only then, in Emmanuel's crumbling letters to Ignatz, that Ivan finds the moral compass to steer him through his own times. His great-grandfather preaches humility, the steadying value of faith in religion, and this hard-won Jewish wisdom: "Do not join power." Given this new insight, Ivan loses nothing when he fails to find the long-lost recipe for the Sonnenschein elixir. That is as unnecessary as the identity of "Rosebud." When Ivan readopts his family's Jewish name he rediscovers their lost values: the gift of breathing freely, true to oneself and not serving others. That was the real Sonnenschein elixir.
THE beautifully rendered Sunshine is the resonant saga of a passion- ate family who, for a time, forgot their centre and fatally served the vagaries of their changing times. Like The Red Violin, the film espouses the ethos of passionate commitment but warns against its misdirection, the dedication that is so narrowly self-serving that it proves self- destructive. The scope and complexity of both films also speak for the passionate commitment of their respective film-makers. Neither of these international epics is an expression -- or symptom -- of that Canadian bugbear, national self-disinterest. Neither pretends to swim in the American commercial mainstream. Rather, both espouse global themes and arenas that suspend the topical concerns of being Canadian for the wider worries of the vanishing human.
Word count: 4247
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Spring 2000
No comments:
Post a Comment