El Violin Details

Intense

Almost impossible to watch at times, the powerful depiction of suffering and cruelty that man can inflict on others is beautifully filmed. In black and white with few words, it is a carefully constructed tale of a peasant village battling against military oppressors. Set in a magnificently beautiful landscape, the poverty and oppression of the villagers is a stark contrast. This is a simple tale, economically told with powerful images. Wonderful Mexican faces make it seem like a documentary at times, and Don Ángel Tavira won a Best Actor citation in Cannes 2005 for his performance as the key figure of an elderly farmer who plays the violin.

[Highly rated reviewer]

The Music Is Over

'El Violin' starts off as a very brutal, polemical piece of film making very much in the mould of Russian revolutionary 'Cine-Fist' cinema by the likes of Sergei Eisenstein, complete with the requisite heroic, landless peasants fighting a 'faceless' ugly fascist junta, but slowly evolves into more of a meditation on the passing of time and the importance of traditions, land and freedoms via the juxtaposition of violin, land/food and gun (and all that they symbolise) and the interaction between an army captain and a one-handed, violin-playing old peasant farmer. Metaphorically and quite literally, the film asks, from where, ultimately, should one gets one's sustenance, one's freedom - from the barrel of a gun or from a 'violin'? Excellent.