Imagine a world in which every book must be written between 90 and 120 pages (with an occasional novel about the Titanic running 200 pages). Any shorter, and booksellers couldn't get away with charging $8; any longer, and readers would get fidgety.

That's roughly the way the film industry works, providing almost no outlet for the hundreds of daring, refreshingly concise short films made every year. Wary of paper-thin plots we know won't stretch over two hours, we crave ensemble films that bring together disparate characters and stories.

Promising five completely different stories united by a common lust for the world's most perfectly crafted instrument, a short-film collage like François Girard's The Red Violin seems particularly appealing. With allure such as this, you can expect sophisticated audiences to flock to The Red Violin with every intention of loving it, only to leave the theater dazed by what they don't find.

The film is this year's The English Patient, a modest artistic statement stretched to epic scale, a critically ballyhooed production destined to disappoint audiences who go in with over-inflated expectations. The Red Violin itself is not a particularly bad film, and it does provide us with yet another magnificent score, but Girard cares less about his short stories than how he plans to tell them.

Beginning in Cremona where musical craftsman Nicolo Bussotti has just completed the perfect violin for his unborn son, the red violin's journey will whisk us across the continent to an Austrian monastery where it comforts a feeble young prodigy, an orphan insistent on sleeping with the instrument, a boy for whom the violin becomes his closest kin.

Nearly a century later, we discover that the violin has resurfaced in England, where Jason Flemyng will have the opportunity to woo audiences as carnally inspired musician Frederick Pope. In concert, Pope's bow takes on the energetic thrusts of his lovemaking and the strings sing his heaves of passion. As in the two earlier episodes, just as things start to get interesting ...

A young girl picks out the violin from the dusty shelves of a Shanghai pawn shop, captivated by the Western instrument. As the Chinese girl grows up to become a party official, hers becomes a forbidden passion, a fascination with a tradition she is obliged to disavow.

Girard weaves his vignettes together in a vaguely chronological order, wrapping the stories in teasing glimpses from a contemporary auction in Montreal, where music specialist Charles Morritz (an oddly cast Samuel L. Jackson) has identified the violin, and awkwardly punctuating the entire film with revelations from a vague and coldly artificial Tarot reading.

Had we known the question we were supposed to be asking ourselves, the film's secret would have been glaringly obvious (I have no doubt that sharper viewers will pick up on the twist long before I did). Despite the transcendent character the violin takes on deep in the film, the instrument serves as little more than a clumsy device to bring us into the stories of characters related only by a common possession.

Before giving us the chance to fully explore any one of his historical periods, Girard abruptly ends the short-film-within-the-film he had been constructing. Like a cop shooing curious spectators from the scene of a crime, Girard tells his audience, "There's nothing more to see here."

After offering some unsatisfying means by which the violin will change hands and then skipping over decades in the violin's life, Girard drops us in a new locale and moves right into another incomplete tale.

Even ABC's short lived Gun, a superficially similar series in which the only common element between each episode was a polished silver handgun destined to affect a completely new cast, offered closure to each of its stories. Leaving the characters' stories open-ended as Girard does reminds us that the violin is the film's focal point, which leaves us even more dissatisfied when he eventually abandons that storyline as well.

Eventually, descendants and interested parties from each of these earlier times will come together for the auction, only to be outbid by a pompous musician with no sentimental ties to the instrument. After two hours of lyrically uneven pacing had lulled me into a state of casual disinterest, the suddenly frantic last-minute climax escalated with such intensity that I actually had to force myself to breathe.

Hinging on Jackson's greedy, dislikable character, the outcome at the auction block will be the make-it-or-break-it moment for audiences still dealing with unmet expectations. Rather than making a flimsy feature length film, Girard offers us a loose two-hour collection of incomplete short films, a collection of vignettes designed to sate our craving for more intellectual cinema. So many loose ends remain forever unanswered; such a range of talented performances seem needlessly spent.

Yet in its closing moments, The Red Violin provides such a burst of vitality that it just might spike the film's flatline reading back to life in the imaginations of some of its viewers.