François Girard

  • The Song of Names (2019)

    The Song of Names (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) There are times when The Song of Names threatens to sink into familiar dramatic movie clichés—it plays around with a multi-decade timespan, with long-lasting grudges, with a personal quixotic quest. Like The Good Liar, it even twists itself into a dual-period 1940s/1980s piece that showcases The Holocaust, and you don’t get any more blatantly manipulative than that. By the weepy end, which seems to overstay its welcome by twenty minutes in order to deliver the statement that the story structurally couldn’t avoid postponing, it’s obviously reaching for the usual levers of the sub-sub-genre: personal atonement, remembering the dead, providing closure. Still, especially compared to other films of its ilk, The Song of Names does have its strengths. A good lead performance by Tim Roth, repressing his own feeling until they shockingly come out punching in a car, is a solid anchor. Clive Owen shows up late in a role almost opposite to anything else he’s played (or being typecast in) before. There is a strong mystery that provides a solid narrative drive to much of the film’s first two acts, even if its conclusion seems to run a bit too long in order to pull everything together. The use of music is a central element, as with director François Girard’s previous Le violon rouge. Technical credentials are excellent, explaining the film’s various Canadian Screen Awards. In the end, The Song of Names is good but (to repeat) there’s a big gap between good and great, and it remains on the side of good. I expect that it will play for years on Canadian cable TV channels.

  • Le violon rouge [The Red Violin] (1998)

    Le violon rouge [The Red Violin] (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2018) As someone who like cinematic form experimentation, there’s no way I wasn’t going to be interested in Le Violon Rouge, a Canadian film tacking not a single character, but a single object through centuries. Here, the story begins in the late seventeenth century, as a grieving violin-maker coats a new violin with a substance of particular meaning. From that dramatic starting point, we follow the violin through Vienna (1793), Oxford (1890s), Shanghai (1960s) and Montréal (1997) as the violin changes hands, creates passions and undergoes surprising changes in fate. As a concept, it’s quite lovely—there are a lot of novels of the sort (or close to it—see the bibliography of James A. Michener and Edward Rutherfurd) but for obvious reasons it’s a much harder form to do as a film—juggling several time periods is a nightmare in itself, not to mention the added production costs. As a result, I can’t help but compare the potential of Le violon rouge with its execution and being slightly disappointed—more time periods, stronger dramatic ironies, perhaps a longer running time in the form of a miniseries could have done the best justice to the idea. Still, what we do have with the finished film in 131 minutes isn’t negligible—the editing hopping back and forth between 1997 Montréal and earlier time period is admirable enough, but writer/director François Girard’s juggling of a large cast of character and five separate languages is an amazing feat in itself. Samuel L. Jackson, Colm Feore, Sandra Oh, French-Canadian cinema fixture Remy Girard and none other than Canadian director Don McKellar (who also co-wrote the film) are only some of the names in the ensemble cast. While Le violon rouge does have flaws, it’s also quite an interesting experiment in cinema itself and does warrant a look if that’s the kind of thing that interests you.