THIRTY-TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (Directed by Francois Girard. Starring Colm Feore)

Glenn Gould was a Canadian concert pianist, writer and artistic enigma who died in 1982, aged 50, but who had retired from the stage in the sixties to concentrate on the purity and clarity of the studio. Taking inspiration from Gould’s fragmented interpretations of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, director Francois Girard presents a semi-documentary collage of his life in 32 brief sections, each intended to show a different perspective. There are interviews with friends, associates and colleagues, animations, abstractions and recreations of key moments in his life, all accompanied (and frequently drowned out) by Gould’s music.

It is a cool, clever, intellectually stimulating piece, which suits the cool, clever and intellectual artist, played (where required) with ghostly intensity by Colm Feore. It avoids the obvious (we never see Gould actually play the piano, though he talks about it often) without actually revealing the hidden. Perhaps the problem is a gap in virtuosity, for while Gould was an artist at the peak of his profession, Francois Girard is a clever but uninspiring film-maker. The thirty-two segments give the film an inventively fresh look and feel, but the camerawork is dull, the mise en scene often drab and the whole lacks any real sense of profundity.