music making for all

Some thoughts on

Divertimento
Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar
starring Lina El Arabi, Oulaya Amamra
France 2022
showing on TV5monde
trailer

I had this film on my films not shown wishlist for a while, and now managed to catch it on TV5 monde. The TV5 blurb only gave first names for the characters and made it look like fiction, so I only found out from the end credits that this is based on real events.

Twin sisters Zahia and Fettouma Ziouani grow up in the 1990s studying music and wanting to become professionals as conductor and cellist, respectively. Coming from an Algerian family in the Parisian social housing suburbs of Seine St. Denis, they face prejudice and open hostility at Paris conservatoires but manage to bridge the cultures, setting up an orchestra called Divertimento among other things.

I love the way the film reflects the single-mindedness of Zahia in particular. There is absolutely nothing in it that isn't related to playing music, either as a help or as a hindrance. Fettouma gets about two seconds of dreaming of quiet conversation with a potential love interest, but Zahia rather counts that as a hindrance too. After that it's music for all and all for the music again.

A musical cliché that the film should have avoided is the young cellist starting her practice with the first movement of the first cello suite. As youtuber Alexis Descharmes has pointed out in his series about cellists in movies many years ago, these bars account for the majority of cinematic cello-playing. Play the Bach suites by all means but there are so many other movements to choose from. I fear the flashmob orchestra performing Ravel's Bolero is also at risk of becoming too widely used, but in defence of this film, it was made before the other recent film that uses it, namely The Marching Band (En fanfare). Which covers a similar subject matter in an interestingly different way.

More interesting music to discover through the film includes Bacchanale by Saint-Saens, which incidentally you can see on YouTube performed by Divertimento, conducted by Zahia Ziouani.

PS Interestingly I had seen each of the two lead actresses separately in their previous films, Lina El Arabi in Les Meilleures, and Oulaya Amambra in Fragile, both dating from 2021. Which is why I had Divertimento on my list.