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Piano virtuoso Glenn Gould, one of this century's most enigmatic musicians, had all the marks of musical genius - blinding talent, a craving for perfection and an obsession with the idea of disembodied communication that drove him beyond the formal traditions of the classical music world. This prodigy who in 1955 dazzled the world with his interpretations of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations turned his back on the concert hall crowd at the height of his success to become a studio recluse. He explored the frontiers of the recording media, fine tuned his metabolism with prescription drugs and kept his distance from the world by tape, radio and telephone.
The film plunges the audience into a storm of Gould's ideas, music and passions with its stunning syncopation of drama and documentary style. Literally thirty-two episodes, each with its own filmic form - abstract, photographic, fictional, archival, historical, interviews - it is modelled on the structure of the Goldberg Variations, framed by Gould's music and woven together by director François Girard's strikingly elegant and fluid visual style. Co-written by Don McKellar (Highway 61, Blue), this playful, rigorous and impressionistic mosaic brings to the screen biography genre an element of the Gouldian spirit of innovation, fashioning a brilliant, contrapunctual portrait of a great artist and his creative lifes' blood.
True to his subject Girard has created a work of conceptual rigor and enormous wit. The medium may be film but the message is music.
- Winner Best Film, 1993 Canadian Genie Awards