Bolero (Short)
No, this is not a remake of the famous Bo Derek film from the ’80s. This is something much, much better– it’s an original take on a somewhat old story, set to Ravel’s famous music. This type of tone poem is relatively out of vogue in modern cinema; we typically have to live with the insipid music videos of today, or dig deep into the fringes of filmmaking, to find such musical storytelling in movies. “Bolero,” written and directed by Dennis Brucks, is from the latter camp, thankfully, and his film recalls passages in the cinema of Malick, Bergman, Kurosawa, and Tarkovsky in telling the story of a boy who finds the courage to break free from an abusive life when he meets a young girl who lives within the walls of his house. The music provides the emotional rises and narrative tensions in Brucks’s film, as he builds to a wickedly fitting conclusion. I wouldn’t compare it to the greatest works from the aforementioned poets of world cinema, but I’ll be damned if “Bolero” doesn’t point to a filmmaker who could be capable of such heights. I’d be very curious to see what a feature film from him would be like.
