In the first scene of Bolero by Anne Fontaine, boots make their way across a muddy sidewalk. Then, an elegant, made-up woman appears, opening the doors of a factory filled with smoke and deafening din. Ida Rubinstein (Jeanne Balibar) is there to meet Maurice Ravel (Raphaël Personnaz), who has promised to deliver a ballet commissioned several months earlier.
For, in the din of the machinery, Ravel perceives an incessant rhythm, a mechanical symphony that repeats itself tirelessly. “This music is the march of time moving forward,” he shouts in the ear of the stunned dancer.
This time that is moving forward, the prodigious composer will immortalize it in his Boleroa sixteen-minute piece in which the same theme is repeated seventeen times in a row and culminates in an almost catastrophic crescendo; a tune that would become so famous that it would be played every quarter of an hour somewhere on the planet, as evidenced by the images of the opening credits, a laborious montage of different international and uneven interpretations of the melody.
More than a biography of Maurice Ravel, it is the trajectory of a score that Anne Fontaine traces (Coco before Chanel) with his Bolero. Unlike other recent films about composers or conductors — think of Maestro (2023) by Bradley Cooper —, we cannot, for this film, reproach the French filmmaker for not giving enough space to the music and the creative genius of her subject.
By focusing on the gestation of a masterpiece, Anne Fontaine offers a sensory incursion into the daily life of a man whose every step, every word, every choice was guided by the melodies that emerged at any moment in his head, and whose understanding of the world, of love, of life in society depended entirely on his music.
Raphaël Personnaz, all inwardness, offers a performance that lives up to the director’s ambition, managing to embody the inner process of creation through his face and listening posture alone.
Unfortunately, Anne Fontaine is more hesitant than her actor to embrace the invisibility of what she is trying to stage. By multiplying the jumps and flashbacks in time, she struggles to trace a narrative line that would hold attention and too often misplaces the essence of her subject in worldly and biographical anecdotes.
The staging, bright and polished, is more coherent, offering all the space to the composer, to the solitude of his work, as well as to the peaceful and majestic landscapes that stimulate his creativity. Thus, the other characters seem only to invite themselves into the frame as in Ravel’s thought to better be chased out by the music.
Moreover, the feature film fails to instill an ounce of substance in the women surrounding the composer, deliberately leaving them in the shadow of the genius. While Doria Tillier and Emmanuelle Devos demonstrate a beautiful sobriety in their interpretation of Misia Sert — the artist’s love interest, but platonic — and Marguerite Long — his friend, pianist and teacher —, Jeanne Balibar composes an almost clownish Ida Rubinstein, to whom it is difficult to adhere. A film that struggles to find its balance.