Bolero

The film follows four musical families across fifty years: a singer in Paris, a dancer in Moscow, a conductor in Berlin, a jazz musician in New York. The Second World War cuts through all of them, and their children grow up in another world. At the end everyone converges on one place in Paris. Claude Lelouch directs. It runs over three hours. The characters look directly at real people: the singer evokes Édith Piaf, the conductor Herbert von Karajan, the jazz musician Glenn Miller, the dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Lelouch does not hide this, and does not use the names either. The title comes from the ending. The closing sequence is Ravel's Boléro at the Trocadéro, danced by Jorge Donn to Maurice Béjart's choreography. That passage went into circulation independently of the film and became the visual equivalent of the piece. The music is by Francis Lai and Michel Legrand, and much of the film's weight rests on them; at times the narrative runs like a bridge between two pieces of music. It was in competition at Cannes in 1981. Who it is for: viewers who want melodrama at epic scale and a film about music. Who it is not for: three hours is long and there are too many characters. Some strands end before they have grown.