The Chorus: Movie & DVD Review (2004)

(Originally published 2004)

The Academy Award-nominated “The Chorus,” from first-time director Christopher Barratier, taps into one of the most sentimental of genres--the student-teacher melodrama--but not in ways that make you want to hurl from a saccharine overdose or throw boxes of Kleenex at the screen.

With its obvious parallels to “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” “Dead Poets Society,” “Music of the Heart” and “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” among so many others, including the film that inspired it, 1945’s “La Cage aux Rossignols,” “The Chorus” could have been one of those nauseating, top-heavy tear-jerkers if the story hadn’t refused to push too hard to move us.

It’s sentimental, yes, but it’s not sentimental slop--always a blessing with this genre, which sometimes leans so heavily toward the heartwarming and maudlin, it can turn the screen purple if not kept in check.

For the most part, Barratier keeps it in check, beginning his movie in the present with Pierre (Jacques Perrin) and Pepinot (Didier Flamand), two elderly men reminiscing about their childhoods at Fond de l’Etang--the school for troubled boys at which they were unwilling students--before flashing back to 1949 France, when they were students.

There, we meet the man who changed their lives--Clement Mathieu (Gerard Jugnot), a beleaguered teacher hired by the unforgiving headmaster Rachine (Francois Berleand) to teach a handful of unruly boys who want nothing to do with him.

From the start, Clement realizes that while World War II might be over, he has nevertheless entered a war zone. These kids are monsters--and why shouldn’t they be? The verbal and physical abuse they suffer daily at the hands of Rachine and his henchmen is intolerable.

For them, the good news is that Clement isn’t so quick to punish. This cool man with the thinning hair and the unrealized music career is determined to set things straight with his own youthful failings before these boys leave their youth. He’s going to reach them and he’s going to do so through music.

On paper, all of this sounds grotesquely formulaic, and I suppose it is--on paper. But “The Chorus” is meant to honor the French films made for families in the ‘40s and ‘50s. It’s inspired by them. As such, what it does right it does very right, indeed.

The film’s cast of professional and unknown actors are especially good, working with screenwriters Barratier and Philippe Lopes-Curval to deepen the predictable rhythms inherent in the genre. Moments are heavy-handed, particularly at the start, but the story and the characters resonate through the brie, particularly when Clement gradually introduces them to the power of song and their own soaring voices, which make for a soundtrack that can be pure--and purely haunting.

Grade: A-