Les Choristes - Heavenly voices
Directed by Christophe Barratier
A personal perspective by Kenneth Lyen
3 stars out of 4.
(Warning: Spoilers below)

Les Choristes is a delightful little film about a newly appointed teacher, Clement Mathieu, who arrives at a wretched reform school for orphaned, abandoned, and psychologically troubled boys, run by a masochistic headmaster.

When I saw the film, the only piece of information I was given, was that it was about a schoolteacher starting a choir. Period. Using just that skeletal piece of information, I constructed a mental picture in my mind as to what I the film was going to be like. I imagined it was going to be a traditional feel-good movie about a music teacher with an unconventional teaching style, rescuing a bunch of forsaken students, transforming them into little angels. Throw in an obligatory villainous headmaster, add a romantic love interest, flash forward to show how the teacher affected the future lives of his students, manipulate the emotions to make the audience cry, and voila, you have the standard Hollywood-style schoolteacher movie.

This is the formula used (with some variations) by a myriad of films about music teachers, such as Mr Holland's Opus, Music of the Heart, and non-music teachers, like To Sir With Love, Dangerous Minds, Stand and Deliver, Dead Poets Society, etc.

My predictions of Les Choristes were not entirely wrong, yet interestingly off target. In fact I was pleasantly surprised. The subject matter was approached in a fresh manner, and I could not always predict the plot turns. It did not try to manipulate my emotions, and I was reasonably satisfied with the understated ending. The feel of the movie was a little reminiscent of Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups (400 Blows), the musicals Oliver!, and Annie, where authority figures were despotic and insensitive to the needs of the students, allowing flagrant injustices to be perpetrated.

The motto of the school was "Action-Reaction", which meant that every misdemeanour would attract a punitive reaction. Unfortunately the punishment meted out was usually far too malignant for our current sensibilities. Indeed when one of the more incorrigible delinquents was wrongly punished and sent away for an act he did not commit, he would later on wreak revenge on the school.