Bolero, The Mystery of Ravel, directed by Anne Fontaine, was selected for the 15th edition of the Varilux French Film Festival 2024. The film boasts impeccable production, with an appropriate cast, meticulously recreated period costumes and sets, and clear dialogue that elucidates the plot. However, this precision and assurance can be seen as an overly summarized approach and perhaps stifling in terms of narrative potential.
Bolero is set in 1928, during the vibrant and crazy years of Paris, when dancer Ida Rubinstein commissions Maurice Ravel to compose a composition for her next ballet. Facing a crisis of inspiration, the film takes us on a journey through the chapters of Ravel’s life, expertly played by Raphaël Personnaz, including his early challenges, the scars of the Great War, and an unrequited love for his muse Misia Sert. Ravel, a complex and Cartesian figure, is portrayed as a remarkably sensitive man devoted to music – to the point of declaring that he never married because he was married to music.
Despite the impeccable setting and good narrative intentions, the film often succumbs to an approach that does not fully explore the emotional and psychological potential of its characters. There are several possible films within this one, each more provocative than the last, but they all seem stifled of their unique possibilities by this summary approach. Ravel’s sexual repression, for example, is underutilized; his lack of carnal impulse is reduced to unrequited gestures of affection or an inability to express his true feelings. This explosion of possibility is treated merely as a backdrop, failing to reach the necessary emotional climax.
The film also fails to deeply explore Ravel’s intellectual and emotional perception of the ballerina’s artistic work, evidencing a perceptual gap between him and dance from a purely intellectual point of view. Such nuances are present and available to the attentive eye, but Fontaine’s direction, although competent, does not dedicate them the attention they deserve, preferring to maintain a safe and linear narrative in a “safe zone”.
Bolero is a pleasant film, which knows how to seduce the viewer with its mixture of captivating lightness and beauty. However, it reveals itself to be a work without great narrative scares, but also without great provocations. Anne Fontaine, in constructing the biography of Maurice Ravel, delivers us a visually splendid work, but one that seems content to remain on the surface of the character’s drama, instead of delving into the depths of his emotional complexities.
Distributed in Brazil by Mares Filmes and with a free age rating, the film, despite its sophisticated pretensions and meticulous study of the period, could have been a more intimate and penetrating study of Ravel.
You can find Bolero at the Varilux Festival 2024.
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