Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding

29 January 2024

Ballando Ballando (Le Bal) (1983)


I’ve been trying to find a good copy of Ballando Ballando for years and found one last week, so I am finally watching it. Ettore Scola’s film is charming and funny with some very silly, delightful performances. The conceit is a nightclub where we spend nearly fifty years from 1936 to 1983 and we see many different characters over this time, but all the actors are the same. The music changes, the dances change, but there’s no spoken dialogue and we watch the passage of time. It’s a set of cinematic restrictions ripe for farce, and it’s successful and always fun to watch.


This is not really interesting to anyone except me, but now that I've finally seen Portrait of Chieko, The Walls of Malapaga, and Ballando Ballando, the number of Foreign Language / International Feature Oscar nominees I've seen has jumped to 337 out of 347 nominees (that number includes this year's five movies). This leaves me only Io Capitano, Perfect Days, and The Teachers' Lounge from 2023, and then Daens (1992), Memories of a Marriage (1989), Nights and Days (1975), The Deluge (1974), The New Land (1972), Live for Life (1967), and Dear John (1964) from previous years.

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