Framed by a present-day bidding war at a Canadian auction house, the narrative begins in 17th-century Italy, as master violin-maker Nicolo Bussotti crafts the perfect instrument for his unborn son. The violin spends 100 years in the possession of an Austrian monastery and orphanage, until it is passed to a 6-year-old prodigy being trained by a French maestro. From there, the instrument travels with gypsies and is bartered to Frederick Pope, a 19th-century British virtuoso whose passionate music is stirred by the violin. By the 20th century, however, the red violin is in China, where a Communist Party official struggles to keep the decadent object hidden from her comrades.

The Red Violin suffers from the weaknesses that afflict almost all anthology films. The episodic structure and necessary passage from one segment to the next means that the audience doesn't get to spend enough time with the characters, or to understand the full relevance of the individual stories in the larger piece. The only performances that really stand out are from Georges Poussin as the French maestro; Don McKellar, who also cowrote this film and Glenn Gould with Girard, as a nervous auction assistant; and Samuel L. Jackson, whose portrayal of a prickly, covetous expert is his best and most nuanced work since he became a leading man.

Otherwise, the film seems to move inexorably from signpost to signpost, accompanied by mostly one-dimensional characters whose situations are either groaningly obvious or fairly obscure. Even the linking scenes at the auction, where descendants from each vignette battle for possession, fail to pay off. (For one thing, how did all these people learn the violin's history, when no one at any previous point in the film seems to know anything about it?)

But an anthology film has its advantages as well--mainly that it leads an audience to play each segment against the other, and to see reflections and motifs that may or may not be there. Girard and McKellar are not dilettantes: They make films that are attractive and spiked with multiple meanings. The simplistic way to tell this story would have been to focus on the violin's beauty, the power of music, and art for art's sake (especially in Red China). Girard and McKellar instead use the presence of the Bussotti to examine the myriad ways that art is inspired, rather than how art itself inspires.

The Red Violin may not make a suitably grand statement that connects all the players and their play, but it pinpoints the small moments quite effectively. The filmmakers explore love and mourning, fear and loneliness, lust and arrogance, panic and defiance, longing and betrayal--emotions that bleed out in the pull of a bow across strings on a magnificent red wooden frame.