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A selection from the critics:
culturevulture.net:: Arthur Lazere Original
Review
There's a bit of slyness going on in The Chorus, which,
on the surface, is a formulaic inspirational teacher tale
in the tradition of The Blackboard Jungle and Goodbye
Mr. Chips -- the "dedicated teacher overcomes resistance
and inspires students to excel" theme. But the name
of the school in The Chorus is "Fond de L'Etang,"
figuratively "Rock Bottom," so it is clear from
the start that writer/director Christophe Barratier has
tongue planted firmly in cheek. The film is a fairy tale,
meant to be a fable, not intended as the straightforward
realism of, say, Blackboard Jungle, although these French
delinquents are every bit as difficult as Glen Ford's
hoodlums, even if they do speak French.
Mild-mannered Clément Mathieu (Jugnot) arrives
to take a teaching position and finds a school where,
despite a rigid disciplinarian of a principal, the staff
has been terrified by the rowdy, unmanageable, often violent
behaviour of the students. Mathieu, the very model of
patience and dedication, uses kindness, humour, and warmth,
along with his interest in music to convert the unruly
rabble into an angelic choir singing Rameau.
Mathieu, the principal, and a variety of the students
are archetypes of stock roles, built to the formula and
deliberately so. What Barratier manages to accomplish
is to make fun of the genre while transcending it, engaging
the audience with appealing characters, the charm of the
youngsters, and the beauty of the music, particularly
the purity of sound produced by the boy soprano, Morhange.
Barratier fills out his roster with other mini-portraits,
all continuing in the context of archetypes--Morhange's
beautiful mother who fills Mathieu with romantic hopes,
the patron Countess who oozes noblesse oblige as she presides
like royalty over a concert by the choir, and little Pépinot,
who waits at the school gate every Saturday, expecting
his parents to arrive and take him away. And, as fairy
tales are required to do, the film casts any semblance
of believability aside in order to come up with an ending
in which the good are rewarded and the bad are suitably
punished.
Without the gently satirical edge, The Chorus would have
been a cloying cliché of a film. Barratier's clever
use of irony to frame his story and his characters allows
him both to use and to comment upon the underlying formula.
It's a risky approach, but he pulls it off with charm
and panache.
Nominated for two Oscars, director Christophe Barratier
seems to have struck a winning chord with his debut feature.
So what's the score then?
In 1949, Clément Mathieu (Jugnot) arrives at a
rural boy's boarding school to take up his new teaching
position. Very soon it becomes clear that these troubled
children are a mutinous handful, ruled by a strict regime
of discipline and punishment. "Action! Reaction!"
is most stringently professed by the tyrannical head,
Rachin (Berléand), which is as far removed from
Mathieu's amiable and approachable disposition as possible.
With a firm and unpatronising manner, he begins to build
bridges towards the children's oppressed and lonely lives.
One such opportunity leads him to marshal the boys into
a choir, which, beyond hopeless at first, he painstakingly
shapes into a beautiful singing choral ensemble. It's
not long before the music magic begins to brighten the
whole school. Also, inevitably every kid finds a new sense
of identity, purpose and confidence that in some small
way changes their lives for the better. In particular,
Mathieu reaches the insular protégé Pierre
Morhange.
With music his passion and having failed as a composer,
Mathieu's own artistic dreams are reinvigorated. He, too,
finds meaning and purpose in the personal success he has
in changing the boys' lives, despite the efforts of the
bitter Rachin.
Barratier based his script on Jean Dreville's La Cage
aux rossignols (1945), but audiences may feel at first
that it's a prison drama with children, such are the clichés
that run down the hallways. A bleak environment, vicious
warden, stern guards, dehumanising treatment and one sympathetic
individual to question and fight the system are all on
the roll call. Little changes over the course of the film,
as success and failure arise over a familiar story arc.
This is not necessarily a bad thing and it's certainly
been done worse. For a film that's honestly committed
to being heart-warming and uplifting, it just about gets
there. There are a couple of genuinely moving moments,
even though the timing may be predictable. Judicious sprinkling
du sucre is both the key to its charm and its lack of
ultimate bite. Decent performances from the cast, young
and old, keep the affair likeable. The polarised Berléand
and eminently engaging Jugnot, in particular, reveal depths
to their characters that are convincing and poignant.
The young soloist Maunier is a singular talent and for
an untrained actor invests Morhange's .problems with sincerity
The treatment of youth resonates across a generation
with nostalgic French flair back to the classroom, while
the running notion of acknowledging dreams and having
them recognised sweeps back to the adults, book-ending
the film deftly.
Before turning filmmaker, Barratier was a classical guitarist
and his musical sensibilities play well on the screen.
Not only did he write several of the pieces that Mathieu
composes (scooping the second Oscar nomination for Best
Original Song), but also holds closely to one of his central
themes, that only music can inspire emotions. When the
final note has ended, The Chorus is a satisfying piece
of mainstream entertainment that makes no bones about
trying to keep you warm and wondering. Don't look for
too much, or you'll be disappointed. Instead, expect great
things from Barratier in the future.
This time the teacher is named Clement Mathieu. In earlier
films it was Mr. Chips, Miss Jean Brodie, Mr. Holland,
Mr. Crocker-Harris (in The Browning Version), John Keating
(in Dead Poets Society), Joe Clark (in Lean on Me), Katherine
Anne Watson (in Mona Lisa Smile)...They all have two
things in common: Their influence will forever change
the lives of their students, and we can see that coming
from the opening frame.
I have nothing against the formula. Done well, it can
be moving, as it was in Mr. Holland's Opus. But The Chorus,
which just recently received a nomination for best foreign
film, does it by the numbers, so efficiently this feels
more like a Hollywood wannabe than a French film. Where's
the quirkiness, the nuance, the deeper levels?
...But perhaps I am too cynical about a perfectly sincere
sentimental exercise. We flash back to 1949 and the Fond
de l'Etang boarding school; the name means (not its official
title, I believe) something like the bottom of the pond.
Here the students are considered pond scum, too impossible
to reach in ordinary schools, and the headmaster maintains
an iron discipline. Young Pierre is a handful, sent to
the school by a single mom who despairs for him. Also
new to the school this term is Clement Mathieu,a pudgy
and somewhat unfocused middle-aged man who is hired as
a teacher's assistant. He loves music, and one day when
he hears the boys singing, a light glows in his eye and
he decides to begin a boys' choir in the school. This
of course is frowned upon by the headmaster, who disapproves
of anything even remotely educational, as such headmasters
always do, and hates even more the idea of students having
fun. But Mr. Mathieu holds rehearsals anyway, secretly,
in sort of a boarding school parallel of the Resistance.
We know without having to see the movie that there will
be vignettes establishing how troubled the kids are, and
scenes in which Mr. Mathieu loses all hope, and a scene
where the kids surprise him, and a scene of triumph, and
a glorious performance at the end. All done competently.
What is disconcerting, however, is how well these boys
sing. After a few months of secret lessons, they sing
as well as -- well, as well as Les Petits Chanteurs de
Saint-Marc Choir, the professional boys' choir that does
the actual singing. Every time those little rascals open
their mouths, somebody seems to have slipped a CD into
the stereo... Am I wearied because I have seen too
many movies telling similar stories? No, it is just that
since I know the story and so does everybody else in the
cinema, it should have added something new and unexpected,
and by that I do not mean hiring Les Petits Chanteurs
de Saint-Marc.
Starting with Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite in
1933, there has been a succession of French movies set
in appalling schools run by insensitive teachers. Meanwhile,
in British and American films, there has been a tradition
of cosy schools where everyone celebrates the warm humanity
of Mr Chips, is encouraged in their musical pursuits by
Mr Holland and learns to sing chorally under the loving
aegis of Father Bing Crosby. Lindsay Anderson's If somehow
merged the two streams in Britain by drawing on Zéro
de conduite for inspiration.
It's a likeable, warm-hearted, manipulative film, predictable
right down to the finale (which is almost identical to
the end of Julia Roberts's recent venture into pedagogy,
Mona Lisa Smile). Among the most popular French pictures
of the past couple of years, it might well have been called
'Au Revoir, Monsieur Pommes Frîtes'
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