Les Choristes (2004)
Directed by Christophe Barratier

Film Review

As far as filmmaking debuts go few have been as enthusiastically received by the public as Christophe Barratier's.  His first feature, Les Choristes (a.k.a. The Chorus), was the French box office hit of 2004, attracting an audience of 8.7 million in France and achieving comparable success abroad, most notably the United States.  Although critical reaction to the film was very mixed, the film was nominated for numerous awards, including eight Césars (justly winning in the categories of Best Music and Best Sound) and two Oscars (for Best Original Music and Best Foreign Language film).  It was certainly an auspicious start for a first-time director who had previously helmed just one short (Les Tombales in 2002), although he had acquired some useful experience as a producer, working for a film production company owned by his uncle Jacques Perrin.  Les Choristes had such an impact on Barratier (himself an accomplished musician) that in 2017 he turned it into a stage musical, performed at the Folies Bergère in Paris.  Barratier had two notable successes after his debut feature, Faubourg 36 (2008) and La Nouvelle guerre des boutons (2011), although these had much smaller audiences (1.3 and 1.5 million respectively).

Les Choristes is a faithful remake of Jean Dréville's 1945 crowd-pleaser La Cage aux rossignols, a minor classic of French cinema which was also a massive hit, although its audience was a mere five million.  Barratier claims to have a fond affection for this film and recalls being deeply moved by it when he saw in on television in his childhood.  The film was directly inspired by the true story of Ker Goat, an educational establishment located near the Breton town of Dinan that employed radically different methods to those used in most schools of the time, imposing discipline through compassion and personal development rather than rote-learning and ill-treatment.  One of Barratier's greatest challenges was finding actors to portray the large ensemble of child characters in the film.  Of the promising non-professionals he recruited through a gruelling process of auditions at schools and colleges in the Clermont-Ferrand region of Auvergne, the director's star-find was Jean-Baptiste Maunier, a soloist in the Lyon-based children's choir Les Petits Chanteurs de Saint-Marc.  The latter provided the film with the impressive vocals for the film's soundtrack, and in doing so it acquired international renown.  With his angelic looks and superlative singing voice, Maunier went on to become a successful singer and actor, taking the lead in Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe's Le Grand Meaulnes (2006) and James Huth's Hellphone (2007).  For the principal adult roles, Barratier could hardly have chosen better than Gérard Jugnot and François Berléand - perfect choices for the contrasting characters of Clément Mathieu, the humane supervisor, and François Berléand, the tyrannical school director.

Les Choristes casually trots out a formula that has already been pretty well done to death in cinema over the past seven decades in such classics as Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), The Browning Version (1951) and Dead Poets Society (1989). French cinema's contribution includes Claude Berri's Le Maître d'école (1981) and Laurent Cantet's Entre les murs (2008).  The idea of a committed schoolteacher employing unorthodox methods to achieve far better outcomes than the traditional (less humane) approach is far from new, so coming sixty years after Dréville's original (and timely) film, Barratier's pretty uninspired remake can't help appearing just a little lacking in engagement and originality.  To a degree, the film makes up for this with its sincerely intended wealth of compassion which (despite being overdone) is remarkably effective in winning over its spectators (especially those of a more sentimental and undemanding nature).  Gérard Jugnot is in his element, playing the kind of sympathetic, downtrodden but thoroughly decent little man who ultimate wins through by virtue of his unshakeable humanity.  It is the kind of role he is best suited for, as is apparent in films such as Une époque formidable (1991) and Monsieur Batignole (2002). Likewise, François Berléand is well chosen to play the unremittingly nasty school director, presenting a brutal tyrant who is the exact polar opposite of Jugnot's kind and tolerant Monsieur Mathieu.

The film's flaws are hard to overlook, however. The main failing is that there is no depth or subtlety to any of the characters.  Creditable as their performances are, Jugnot and Berléand fail to come across as anything more than crude, one-dimensional archetypes, and none of the child characters has enough presence or substance to make any real impact (with the notable exception of Grégory Gatignol's psychotic thug Pascal Mondain).  The choral interludes are heavenly but their impact is mitigated by the fact that the recorded singing is so poorly synchronised with the actors' lip movements.  A far greater fault is the intrusive background score that provides a distractingly slushy undertone to just about the entire film.  No heartstring is left untugged as every single excuse for heavy-handed sentiment-tweaking is ruthlessly exploited.  Some films of this ilk manage to achieve a compassionate stance without sinking into gushing mawkishness.  Despite the best intentions of its well-meaning director, Les Choristes doesn't quite manage to achieve this and rather than leaving you feeling buoyed up (as any feel-good film ought to do) you are left with the unpleasant sensation that you have spent ninety minutes wallowing in a vat of over-sugared treacle.  Les Choristes is not without charm but its appeal is pretty well limited to mainstream cinema audiences with a high tolerance for low-grade sentimentality and a pretty undemanding appetite when it comes to anything of real substance.

Film Synopsis

The world famous orchestra conductor Pierre Morhange is performing at a concert in the United States when he learns of the death of his mother.  On his return to France to attend the funeral he is visited unexpectedly by a man named Pépinot who turns out to be one of his old classmates at a severe boarding school he attended in the late 1940s.  Pépinot presents Pierre with the diary of their erstwhile supervisor Clément Mathieu, which recounts the latter's attempts to civilise the school's attendees using more humane methods than were usual for the time.   As they read the diary, the two sixty-year old men are transported back to 1949, to the day when Mathieu arrived at the school Fond de l'Étang and was met by a waif-like infant named Pépinot.  The latter makes a habit of waiting at the school gates in the hope that his parents will one day return, even though they both died during the Nazi Occupation.  Mathieu receives a frosty reception from the school's short-tempered director, Monsieur Rachin, who employs the most brutal of methods to instil discipline in the unruly boys under his charge - with little sign of success.

Although he is ridiculed at first by the rebellious youngsters in his care, Mathieu gradually manages to gain their respect by treating them fairly and humanely, even if this brings him into conflict with his implacable superior.  Mathieu's sole passion in life is music.  His ambition is to be a great composer and what little free time he has he devotes to writing orchestral pieces.  One day, he hears his unruly pupils singing insulting songs about him.  Offensive as the words are, Mathieu sees at once that the boys have an aptitude for singing and sets out to use this to improve their self-regard and behaviour.  He creates a choir and begins training the boys to sing classical choral pieces.  Mathieu's efforts are frustrated by the reluctance of one boy - Pierre Morhange - to join in, even though he has the sweetest voice of all.  By becoming acquainted with Pierre's anxious mother, Matthieu is able to win Pierre over.  The arrival of a violent delinquent, Pascal Mondain, poses further difficulties.  Mondain may have a fine singing voice but he is fiercely aggressive and when a large sum of money goes missing he is the obvious culprit.

After Mondain has been handed over to the police, Rachin instructs his supervisor to disband the choir at once.  Mathieu refuses and continues holding singing lessons in the dormitory before bedtime.  When a rich countess, one of the school's benefactors, gets to hear about the choir she requests Rachin to organise a concert.  The event proves to be a huge success and, naturally, the director receives all of the credit.  Mathieu's hopes ultimately appear to go up in smoke when the school is set on fire by a vengeful Mondain.  At the time, the school was left unattended as the boys, under Mathieu's supervision, were taking a walk in the nearby countryside.   Rachin naturally blames this calamity on his untrustworthy supervisor and promptly dismisses him.  On leaving the school, Mathieu is showered with good will messages from his former pupils.  As he is about to board a bus, the solitary man is met by Pépinot, who insists on departing with him.