Bolero

Bolero (Les uns et les autres, 1981) is Claude Lelouch's sprawling, three-hour musical drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. Four families — Russian, German, French and American — are carried across three decades of the twentieth century by a single shared force: music. Every storyline gets its own theme, and those themes keep returning like leitmotifs as the years pass.

Their paths cross, scatter and cross again across different cities and eras, until a world war breaks everything open. Some lose family, some lose a homeland; musicians and dancers start over on foreign stages. The characters are invented, yet their models are easy to spot — a singer cut from Édith Piaf's cloth, a conductor with von Karajan's bearing, a Black cabaret star echoing Josephine Baker, a bandleader shaped after Glenn Miller. Robert Hossein, Geraldine Chaplin, Daniel Olbrychski and Fanny Ardant fill out the cast.

Lelouch packs the film with numbers: Soviet ballet, the Folies Bergère and the Lido, big bands, rock and musical theater rolling past nonstop. Then the finale ties every thread together with Ravel's Boléro — dancer Jorge Donn performs it at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, and plenty of viewers sit through the whole epic for that single sequence. Long, sometimes naive, but wholehearted cinema for anyone who loves a music-driven fresco. Stream Bolero online on iFILM.