Divertimento

Director: Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar (France). Year of Release: 2022

1985, Stains. A concrete jungle in Saint Denis, a working class district on the edge of Paris. A 7-year old girl leaves her bedroom and heads towards the sound of Ravel’s Bolero. Her parents are watching a performance on the telly conducted by Sergiu Celibidache. As her father ushers her to sit between them on the sofa, the girl is fixated by the vision of Celibidache’s hands on the screen. As the Bolero heads to its crescendo ending, we see her own hands conducting along.

Ten years later. The twins Zahia and Fettouma are bidding farewell to their friends. They’ve been accepted into Lycée Racine in Paris. Fettouma is a cellist, while Zahia is a viola player with ambitions to become a conductor. Both have outgrown their local music school in Stains. But whereas their old classmates are working class kids from diverse backgrounds, the pupils at the Lycée are uniformly rich and white. Many are the sons and daughters of famous musicians.

Zahia and Fettouma soon come into conflict with Lambert, the Lycée’s current star conductor. Lambert looks a lot like Roger Federer and has an equally punchable face. He has the deportment of someone who was born into money and privilege. Lambert is incredulous that a girl would want to conduct and, together with his brass playing mates, does his best to disrupt Zahia at every possible opportunity. At one stage, in a public argument, he demands that she know her place.

When Zahia introduces a piece by explaining the influence of Native Americans, most of the rest of the class complain that they’re not here for a history lesson, and can’t they just play? This is nothing compared to the behaviour of Lambert and his mates who put their hands to their mouths and make the whooping noise made when you’re playing Cowboys and Indians. For them, music is a hobby, not a calling, and they are not interested in why anything sounds the way it does.

Zahia is taken under the wing of a couple of the teachers at the Lycée – including Celibidache, the conductor she viewed in the opening scene. Celibidache has some sort of social conscience – when he was younger, he might have gone into politics before he decided to put all his energies into music – but this does not extend towards women’s rights. In front of the class, he tells Zahia that conducting isn’t a profession for women. Nonetheless he admires her headstrong persistence.

The film deftly handles a number of sub-plots. Zahia notices that one of her fellow pupils spends a lot of time practising on his own, giving virtuoso performances on clarinet and piano. They start to collaborate – him playing Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights as she conducts. Zahia learns that his father is in prison, but unlike her very close relationship with both her sister and her parents. he hates his father and refuses to visit him. A reunion of sorts is arranged with limited success.

Zahia and Fettouma are at least as good and twice as dedicated as any of their fellow-pupils at the Lycée, but are never allowed to feel part of the group. This is why – on top of the exams and their work helping kids in the community – the 17-year olds decide to set up a symphony orchestra in Stains, something which has never previously been thought possible. They attract 7 Lycée pupils to come with them, but even the Communist mayor is loath to make available the necessary finances.

Nonetheless the orchestra fights to be admitted in a coming competition. The way in which the inner city orchestra of different talents develops through cooperation contrasts starkly with the competitiveness of the Lycée. Fittingly, Zahia chooses for them a piece from Saint-Saëns which built on the musical styles of other cultures. Zahia insists that the percussionists use instruments like those envisaged by Saint-Saëns , not the Western copies which had come to replace them.

Divertimento is, in a sense, the anti-Tár. Whereas Todd Field’s epic was – for better or worse – about what set Lydia Tár apart from society, Zahia is a very ordinary, humble, and shy member of a very close community. She is not just excluded because of her gender, but because of her race and class. Rather than wallowing in her exceptional talent, she returns to her background. Celibidache teaches her that a conductor can only become great when he (or she) is at one with the orchestra.

In this sense, where Tár is about the triumph of the individual, Divertimento is about community. For most of the time it seems to be headed towards a clichéd feelgood ending where Zahia and Fettouma win an Important competition. Shortly before the end, the film takes a left turn, and finishes instead in a scene in Stains, which is implausible in the way it is staged, but still manages to embody the film’s central message that oppression is best countered by class solidarity.

At the same time, Divertimento does not end in unbelievable success. It feels much more authentic than most “based on a true story” films that I have seen. Yes, the real life Zahia and Fettouma did experience personal success, but we are made painfully aware of the many who were left behind. Yes, they set up a symphony orchestra for underprivileged musicians in Stains, but, as the end credits remind us, still only 6% of conductors worldwide are female, and only 4% in France.

In a liberal film, Zahia and Fettouma would be destined to succeed. All they needed would be persistence and parental support. However, some of the well-meaning parents’ support does not help. On the advice of a badly misled child psychologist, the girls are not taught Arabic, following advice given by a French child psychologist to their Algerian parents. At such moments, we see how deeply rooted the effects of institutional racism really are.

Divertimento is a great film about confronting racism, sexism and class inequality, which does not peddle the illusions of a level playing field. The solutions shown within the film are ultimately individual, but it makes us very aware of the need for deeper rooted change. Also, the music is pretty good.