The Red Violin (Le Violon Rouge in French-speaking Canada) is about a musical instrument with perfect acoustical qualities that carried a curse on its many owners from the time it was made by a Niccòlo Bussoti (played by Carlo Cecchi) in 1681 until the present day, when it is sold for millions at an auction house in Montréal. The journey of the violin starts in Cremona, Italy, goes to a monastery in Vienna, and then gypsies take the instrument to London. A Chinese man takes the violin from England to Shanghai, where he pawns it, and a violinist buys the red violin, hides it from those who might burn it during the Cultural Revolution along with all things Western, and then it is sold along with some seventy other violins to a collector, who turns the lot over to Canadian auctioneers. Toward the end of the film we learn that the red coloring came from the blood of the violin-maker’s wife Anna (played by Irene Grazioli), who died in childbirth. When the film ends, we see Charles Morritz (played by Samuel L. Jackson), an antique violin authenticator brought in to determine which instrument is the red violin, exchanging red violins just before the sale at the auction, leading us to believe either that he stole the red violin or that he originally intended to steal the famous violin but changed his mind at the last minute in order to avoid the fate of death that has befallen everyone who has possessed it. In short, the film consists of several short stories of different times and places, providing the cross-cultural wisdom that the modern age in the West is incredibly parochial. Released last year at film festivals in Toronto and Venice, and this year for release in the United States, the plot is not new—we have seen the same concept developed in The Dress (1996), Tales of Manhattan (1942), Twenty Bucks (1993), The Yellow Rolls Royce (1965), but perhaps the film has more affinity to the Humphrey Bogart classics The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948),which focus on the price of human greed in a world with many unmet basic human needs. Perhaps the most rewarding element of the film is that the director, François Girard, uses the story to provide a score of classical musical not unlike his earlier Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993). MH