The Grand Bolero

Popflick’s Foreign Movie Bonanza: Stream the Art House into Your Home

The world embraces American cinema, but love is not necessarily reciprocal. Foreign films usually remain in the Art House circuit, where they compete for a limited number of screens with homegrown indie productions, which always have the advantage of cultural immediacy. From time to time, you get an odd breakout hit, like the Korean Best Picture Oscar winner “Parasite” (Bong Joon Ho, 2018) or the Indian action hit “RRR” (S.S. Ramajouli, 2022). But for every movie that makes it to your local theater, there are hundreds, thousands, that will not.

"The Grand Bolero": A Thriller In Tune With The Art House Crowd

“The Grand Bolero” is a hothouse drama about obsession, incubated during the COVID era, and a fascinating capsule of that time. The particularities of life during the pandemic color the plot in unexpected ways. It’s a tight story developed in a single location with a cast of four. The filmmakers see this not as an inconvenience but as an integral dramatic element of the movie. The pandemic rages on and off camera. We see news reports in the background on a TV. Ambulance sirens sound far away, as ominous as distant thunder. These are not mere anecdotes for the press notes. The life-saving repressive measures of the moment put the world in synch with the nature of our protagonist.