Les Cachetonneurs (1998)
Directed by Denis Dercourt

Film Review

For his promising first feature Les Cachetonneurs, director Denis Dercourt turns in a pleasing low-key comedy which, although somewhat unpolished and sluggish, provides a wryly entertaining portrait of a band of disparate musicians who have to freelance to practice their art. Dercourt's ample experience as a musician (he teaches at the Strasbourg Music Conservatory) was put to good use, making up for his lack of experience as a director.  Whilst his first film is a little rough around the edges it is true to life and instantly engaging.  On its original release in France in 1998, the film had mostly positive reviews and received the Grand prix Passion d'or at the Aubagne Film Festival.

Where Les Cachetonneurs is strongest is in its authentic depiction of a group of very different individuals struggling to hold together as a team in spite of the forces that are gradually driving them apart.  Despite their innumerable personal problems and barely contained enmities, somehow their intense love of music is strong enough to keep them together and preserve the unity of the group. The film benefits from an intelligent, considered screenplay and some strong performances from an ensemble of talented but fairly unknown young actors.  One of these, Pierre Lacan, would later go on to become a film director himself with Légitime défense (2011).

Denis Dercourt followed his promising debut feature with an idiosyncratic melodrama involving a priest and a prostitute, Lise et André (2000).  It wasn't until he directed La Tourneuse de pages (2008), a slick psychological thriller highly evocative of Claude Chabrol's best work, that he came to be regarded seriously as a filmmaker, and in his subsequent work - Demain dès l'aube (2008), La Chair de ma chair (2013), Die Lehrerin (2019) - he shows an increasing fascination with the darker places of the human psyche.

Film Synopsis

Roberto, a young freelance musician, agrees to give a New Year's Eve concert of chamber music and Viennese waltzes at an aristocrat's château in Normandy.  For this, he assembles a sextet of musicians from his friends, but he soon realises he has serious problems to contend with.  His flutist, Thérèse, is nine months' pregnant and might give birth at any moment; his cellist, Lionel, is a kleptomaniac; his viola player, Martial is hypersensitive and flares up whenever the mood takes him; his violist, Diana, has an inferiority complex; and his clarinettist cannot read a note of music.   To make matters worse, the conductor, Svarowski, has yet to turn up...