Own the rights?
I'm a great admirer of both Yo Yo Ma and Atom Egoyan, so was naturally excited to learn what a combination of their artistic forces would look and sound like. 'Sarabande', like the other episodes in Ma's TV series 'Inspired by Bach' had to fit in a 1-hour format, and Egoyan's solution to that restriction was to come up with a loosely cut collage of scenes from the lives of five people that intersect around the performance of Bach's cello suite #4 in Toronto. The fly-on-the-wall feeling this generates will be familiar to admirers of Robert Altman's films, which are often about randomly intersecting lives that can sometimes have a profound influence on each other. In fact there is another connection, since Lori Singer plays a cellist in both 'Sarabande' and Altman's 'Short Cuts'.The different angles on music & life of the main characters are matched by the very different 'angles' from which you hear Bach's music: in concert, in a masterclass, on the radio, in the back of a limousine, in a doctor's office. Mr. Ma plays himself, and delivers his lines just as convincingly as the professional actors around him.There was a very curious dichotomy in votes at time I made this comment: a roughly equal percentage of voters gave it 8 or more as gave it 1. I'm at a loss to see what people in the latter category expected from this film that made them so bitterly disappointed.
You may report errors and omissions on this page to the IMDb database managers. They will be examined and if approved will be included in a future update. Clicking the 'Update' button will take you through a step-by-step process.
