Les Uns et les Autres

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Les Uns et les Autres (Bolero)
Directed by	Claude Lelouch
Produced by	Claude Lelouch
Written by	Claude Lelouch
Starring	Robert Hossein Nicole Garcia Geraldine Chaplin Daniel Olbrychski Jorge Donn Fanny Ardant Jacques Villeret Richard Bohringer James Caan and many others
Music by	Michel Legrand Francis Lai Pierre Barouh Jean Yanne Marc de Loutchek
Cinematography	Maurice Béjart
Release date(s)	1981
Running time	184 min
Country	France
Language	French, German, English, Russian
IMDb profile

Les Uns et les Autres is a 1981 French film by Claude Lelouch.

The film is a musical epic and it is widely considered as the director's best work with Un Homme et une Femme, Palme d'or in Cannes. In the United States, it was distribued under the name Boléro in reference to Maurice Ravel's famous orchestral piece, used in the film.

[edit] Plot

The film follows four families, with different nationalities (French, German, Russian and American) but with the same passion for music, from the 1930s to the 1960s. The various story lines cross each other time and again in different places and times, with their own theme scores that evolve as time passes.

The main event in the film is the Second World War, which throws the stories of the four musical families together and mixes their fates. Although all characters are fictional, many of them are loosely based on historical musical icons (Édith Piaf, Josephine Baker, Herbert von Karajan, Glen Miller, Rudolf Nureyev, etc.) The Boléro dance sequence at the end brings all the threads together.