'Les Choristes': music, with class

The chill, bleak morning Clément Mathieu arrives to take up his post as class supervisor at a private boarding school lost in the countryside, a small boy is waiting just inside the locked iron gates. Every Saturday, he hopes his father will finally come for him. Every other day is a Saturday in the child's mind, but his parents are dead.
"Action. Reaction!"
Each crime brings its punishment, even when the offences lie purely in troubled adolescent heads and hearts confined largely to dully furnished classrooms and spartan dormitories. The man Clément is replacing shows him an armful of surgical stitches. The stab wound was the reaction of the boy from whom he confiscated a packet of cigarettes. While the response to the assault is short of police intervention, the culprit spends much of his time in the lock-up or doing menial chores.
Clément, a onetime music teacher and discreet amateur composer superbly played by Gérard Jugnot, is set straight to work with the benefit of grim good luck wishes, a shortlist of names of the most rebellious boys and a sour introduction to the despotic headmaster of the school.

A modest new masterpiece of French cinema begins with bad news and a light classical waltz in modern New York, but the real story is set in the Auvergne of 1949, when much of France remained traumatised by enemy occupation and war.
On the remarkable official site of 'Les Choristes' (Fr.), director Christophe Barratier outlines the then prevailing psychology of child reform, which is certainly "disturbing today", adding that "as in all periods of crisis, parents had other priorities ahead of educating their children."
Such methods of "social reinsertion" (a term still employed but as little practised or thought out in some post-conflict countries in our time) prevailed well into the 1960s, along with much of the austerity Jugnot, like me, remembers from his own schooldays, the everlasting smell of chalk dust and the "mouldy memories".

With a solid supporting adult cast, Jugnot, the teenagers and the music they come to make together are the real stars of this flawlessly paced and deeply heart-warming movie. The score is partly the original work of Bruno Coulais (Amazon.fr only for the soundtrack at present), who won fame when he composed the music for such outstanding and varied achievements as 'Himalaya' (1999) and 'Le Peuple Migratoire' ('Winged Migration,' 2001) .
In his début as director for the general public, Barratier reveals another considerable talent by himself contributing two of the key songs performed by the chorale, in reality the Petits Chanteurs de Saint-Marc.
The 12-year-old lad from this ensemble based near Lyon whose phenomenal voice convinced film-maker and producers alike that they could have a small miracle on their hands was Jean-Baptiste Maunier. He also landed the difficult child star role of Pierre Morhange, whom we first meet some 50 years later as one of the world's most acclaimed orchestral conductors.

Article Author: Nick Barrett

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