VIRTUOSI : 'The Red Violin' & 'Election'.

When is a violin more than a violin? All the time, answer scriptwriter Don McKellar and director Francois Girard, the creators of the genially spooky new Canadian movie, The Red Violin. All the time, that is, if it was made by Nicolo Bussotti, a seventeenth-century Cremonan craftsman played, with scary intensity, by Carlo Cecchi. He fashions his masterpiece in honor of his beautiful pregnant wife, Anna, and for the future glory of their child, who surely will grow up to perform miracles on it. Then the worst happens and Nicola gazes at Anna's corpse on the birthing bed while the stillborn baby is wrapped and removed. For a man like Bussotti grief must lead to drastic defiance. He takes his instrument and...does something that makes a violin a lot more than a violin. You find out what that something was only at the end of the film when the now 320-year-old masterpiece is placed on auction in the Montreal of the 1990s.

By then it has passed through several hands. In late eighteenth-century imperial Vienna, a child prodigy's performance on it should win employment by the aristocracy, but can the youth's heart, burdened both with a natural defect and the expectations of his kindly but desperate teacher, hold up during a crucial audition for a prince who regards both boy and violin as naught but possible ornaments of his own grandeur? In Victorian England, romantic virtuosity as embodied by Frederick Pope, a British version of Paganini, titillates middle-class audiences but must be fed by erotic frenzy, a frenzy that the red violin seems to provoke supernaturally. Eighty years later, in the People's Republic of China, individualistic Western art is condemned during the Cultural Revolution and the haunted fiddle nearly ends up in a bonfire. But, rescued and brought to Canada to make money for a China now friendly to capitalism, the violin finally yields its secret to an expert evaluator of old instruments, Moritz (Samuel L. Jackson).

The instrument can, of course, be regarded as a symbol of art itself, and the uses of it by its different owners display the various attitudes toward art through the ages-aristocratic pleasure, enemy of ideology, etc. But the double-headed surprise ending makes you realize that the red violin, finally, cannot be a symbol, since a symbol stands for something and serves a meaning, while the violin's ultimate destiny is simply to be and not to serve anyone's view of what art signifies.

It's not often that filmmakers become instant favorites of mine on the basis of one effort, but that's what McKellar and Girard became with their Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould. While not the equal in originality or resonance of that 1994 minor masterpiece, the new movie is good enough to keep me a fan. The McKellar-Girard specialty is bemusement at human oddity, an emotion that might have been wasted on a ghost story that evokes wonder at superhuman forces. But Girard doesn't let the supernatural elements in his tale overheat his style, which remains still, watchful, expectant. The long fingernails of an aristocrat, the way an apprentice shrinks into himself as his master inspects his latest effort, the disconcertment of a hotel desk clerk at the sudden rage of a guest: these are what Girard's camera takes in, just as a quiet child at an adult gathering notices the quirks of the self-important, jabbering grownups. (And in the episode of the British Paganini, Girard's deadpan style keeps the over-the-top parody of romantic excess from wandering into Ken Russell territory.)

In a movie full of good acting, Jean-Luc Bideau excels as the little virtuoso's French teacher. This actor gives you the time-travel effect that superb performances in period roles always deliver. Watching them, you understand that people who wore waistcoats and breeches and powdered wigs, who bowed and rarely shook hands and never heard the sound of an engine revving up, were like us and yet not like us at all. Even the way Bideau raises his arms in joy at the playing of his pupil is not the way one of us would do so because the coat this man wears creates a constriction that even a modern tuxedo doesn't have. Like Bideau, the entire film comes across as very strange and very human. Though Joshua Bell does the off-screen fiddling and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts an original score by John Corigliano, the real music in this cunning little epic is in the faces, glances, and gestures of its characters, even in their silences.

If Girard has made a not unworthy successor to his first feature, director Alexander Payne and writer Jim Taylor have far surpassed their debut, the fine Citizen Ruth, with Election, the best American satire since Dr. Strangelove. Whatever its fate at the box office, this work will one day be recognized as one of the very few classic films of its decade.

It is the story of an Omaha high school election for the office of class president and how its outcome is influenced by the enmity a civics teacher, Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), comes to feel for one of the campaigners, a hugely energetic and frighteningly self-righteous student, Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon). By the time the student triumphs (temporarily) and the teacher is ruined (also temporarily), we have been conducted into some very dark areas of American life: the pursuit of success as an end in itself; the inability of people in a pragmatic, business-oriented society to distinguish between mere rules and fundamental morality; the failure of basically good people to keep their fight for justice disinterested; the newly liberated nihilism of the young whose enthusiasm can be roused only by that candidate (one of Tracy's rivals) who promises to destroy all politics at their school. Above all, the movie is about self-deception: the self-deceptions of the blindly ambitious which empower their predations, and those self- deceptions of more scrupulous people which compromise their moral efforts.

All of this is dramatized concretely, without editorializing but with savvy humor and a cinematic playfulness always serving the inner meanings of the story. With the little space left to me, let me cite two examples of this scrupulous virtuosity.

The very first shot shows us a water sprinkler moistening the high school's lawn, surely a curiously innocuous way to launch a satire. But the camera's steady gaze makes us concentrate on the gadget and the way its pumping sound takes on an implacable rhythm. This rhythm is continued and amplified by Reese Witherspoon's performance of Tracy. It is in her voice as she verbally pummels a dopey, well-meaning jock persuaded by McAllister to oppose the girl in the election. It is in her footsteps as she strides down the hall, and it's in the way she stamps the image of her face on her campaign buttons. Opposing this mechanistic rhythm is the ambling, thoughtful, diffident gait of McAllister, who wants to sabotage the Tracy blitzkrieg but winds up too self-compromised to do so. The clash of these rhythms brings to mind Yeats's "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." Yet McAllister can't be counted among the best, nor Tracy the worst. His is a flaccid virtue, while she is too callow to be truly diabolical.

To appreciate brilliant comic staging, study the way the hapless jock Paul delivers his first campaign speech. (Chris Klein's performance makes the boy blissfully, almost blessedly stupid.) After the shorter Tracy has used the microphone, McAllister raises it for his protege but not high enough. Paul, too dim to think of making the necessary adjustment, bends forward to read his cliche-ridden speech. This makes it appear as if his body were being weighed down by the unwonted challenge to his mind. His delivery achieves total monotony until he reaches his peroration, at which point the boy straightens up too soon, letting his last words be swallowed by silence and leaving his audience too confused to applaud. The effect of all this is funny yet it's not the funniness of slashing satire but rather of some odd, unsettling mixture of derision and compassion.

That mixture is Alexander Payne's stylistic signature. In The Sun also Rises, the narrator's friend, Bill Gorton, keeps sardonically proclaiming that one must give 'em irony and, after that, give 'em pity. Payne gives us both, perfectly blended.