Tambour battant (2019)

In 1970, in the small Valais village of Monchoux (a fictional village), Aloys has been leading the village band for 12 years and dreams of seeing it selected for the Federal Festival. But some of the band members question his abilities and decide to hire a professional to lead a new band. Pierre, the son of Robert, the village’s former doctor, therefore returns to Monchoux and forms a rival band, which includes women and Italian farmworkers, much to Aloys’s fury. On top of that, his wife Marie-Thérèse and his daughter Colinette no longer accept remaining in the subordinate position traditionally assigned to women, and Marie-Thérèse begins campaigning for women’s right to vote. Aloys uses every means at his disposal to try to sabotage Pierre’s “socialist” band. Along with other landowners, he pressures the Italian farmworkers to leave Pierre’s band. They persuade some shopkeepers to refuse service to customers who support the new band. He also reports Pierre to the police for possession of hashish. Aloys’s band’s brand-new jackets are also mysteriously stolen, then eventually found on scarecrows, damaged by painted inscriptions. On the day of the vote that grants Valais women the right to vote in cantonal elections, the two bands parade through the village streets, and their encounter leads to a violent brawl. Marie-Thérèse then devises a scheme to lock Aloys and Pierre in Aloys’s wine cellar, forcing them to talk. The day of the audition for the Federal Festival is ultimately disrupted: Aloys has put laxatives in the bottles of wine distributed to the musicians, while Robert hands out hashish biscuits made by Pierre to the jury. Aloys is on the verge of giving up when an all-female band joins him on stage and performs a piece that electrifies the audience and the jury. The film ends with the wedding of Colinette, Aloys’s daughter, to Carlo, one of Aloys’s Italian farmworkers.