Le batteur du boléro

One of French cinema's leading directors Patrice Leconte has made films which have revealed hidden talent of leading French actors. For example:Jean Rochefort, Gérard Jugnot,Thierry Lhermitte etc. There are also some important actors namely Jacques Villeret who did not get a chance to work with him in his films. As Patrice Leconte always wanted to make a film with Jacques Villeret, he decided to cast Villeret in "Le batteur du Boléro". The fact that he would work with Jacques Villeret on a short film with limited public reach did not bother him at all. It is a simple film without any intellectual pretensions which seem to have become a hallmark of many French films. It is a film about music but no knowledge of music is required to understand this film. One needs to just relax and watch how music is played by other musicians. There are no dialogs in this film but a lot of reading of subtitles is in store for viewers. This is something inevitable as the reading of subtitles give a clear idea about the film.

This is a hilarious film about the role of the snare drummer in Ravel's Bolero- in 8 minutes (shorter than the actual piece, which runs closer to 14 minutes) we see the range of the part as it is required to be performed. There is an insistent quality to this work, brought about by the repetitive snare drum part which is shared with the rest of the orchestra in different places. In addition to this the entire piece continues to get louder on each repetition of the main melody.

For any one playing the snare drum part it is a balancing act between maintaining the pattern, creating the continuous crescendo and not losing where you are. Having been called upon to play this in an audition over 20 years ago (they only wanted 4 repeats of the pattern and a small crescendo), I can tell you that it takes a lot of concentration to play even that - the entire piece is a tour-de-force.

To me the point of this film is to show us just how hard yet deceptively simple this piece is - playing the same four bars (about 4 seconds) about 120 times with each repetition slightly louder than the last.

As the orchestra plays, a man sits keeping a simple rhythm on his single drum. Over the duration of the film we watch as he keeps the rhythm but struggles to keep his focus as he gets slightly bored with such a simple job.

I'm not sure what the point of this short film is but it is hypnotically effective while it does it. Simply, for 8 minutes the music plays while we are treated to a static profile shot of the drummer keeping time. He moves his head, he glances around, he stretches but never breaks the time. In terms of content, nothing actually happens but I couldn't look away for the promise that it might. However when the film ends it is not a disappointment as it is quite nice a conclusion even if it just stops. The music makes it more enjoyable because you feel like you are seeing a small part of a bigger thing that you can only hear.

It isn't perfect of course because there is no substance and there is nothing of great interest that actually occurs. The static camera could have been awful but it still manages to be interesting nonetheless. Villeret is pretty good considering how little he has to do and, while he can't make it great, he does enough to hold the attention.

Overall this is not a great short but, for what it is, it holds the attention really well and is quite engaging but just don't expect too much from it. I suppose if it does enough to grab you enough to watch twice then there may be enough there to allow you to interpret the image you see as an insight into how big things of beauty (the music) are all made up of small things that appear insignificant or boring.