Soloist

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

If celebrity -- its getting, having and spending -- is the great theme of late 20th century life, then reclusivity is surely its most haunting variation. To be known for your unknowability, or anyway your elusiveness, is a possibly unintentional yet perversely elegant strategy for drawing attention to yourself, as Garbo and J.D. Salinger have demonstrated. But they had to stop performing and publishing to pull it off. Glenn Gould, the genius-struck Canadian concert pianist, could have his cake and eat it too. He quit making public appearances in 1964, but he never stopped recording -- and obsessively re-recording to achieve the perfect performance -- and reports of his increasingly curious ways continued to flourish until his death in 1982. And beyond. The latest account of the pianist's eccentricities is Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould. A quasi-documentary, it alternates sympathetic eyewitness accounts of his behavior with fact-based, fictionalized fragments of his life, in which actor Colm Feore displays a fine touch of madness.

Director and co-screenwriter Francois Girard's allusive approach suits a subject who loathed grandiosity. A portrait emerges of one of those functioning paranoids -- such disparate figures as Bobby Fischer and John McEnroe come to mind -- who see all around them a conspiracy to rob their art of its purity. The sounds of sucking, the grindings of the publicity machine -- they drown out the high, clear notes such figures strive so hard to strike and, in Gould's case, the genius of the composers he was serving. Doubtless we now have a chemical to treat what ailed him. But there is something exemplary in his withdrawal, something touching about this man who eventually haunted truck stops trying to understand the rhythms of ordinary life, and placed all- night phone calls to friends trying to make them understand his extraordinary one.