The Chorus (2004)

What a beautiful little film that is engaging and enchanting from the very first scene. Even the harshness of life in a correctional boarding school is treated with simplicity without resorting to gratuitous violence.

Gerard Jugnot delivers an excellent portrait of a school prefect who has no great talent other than a humanity and devotion to the students under his care. History shows that this ordinary individual has a talent for spotting genius in others and by the conclusion of the film we are exuberant at the rounding off of each theme and character.

I defy anyone not to have a tear running down their cheek at some stage of this film. It tugs at the heart strings and is uplifting at the same time. In particular the two final scenes warrant special attention and acclaim. The view of tiny little hands all saying their own farewell is one of the most moving scenes I have seen in any movie.

Les Choristes truly deserves wide acclaim and the sacrifice made by Gerard Jugnot in helping finance the film is a credit to his belief in this script and a reward for delivering such a wonderful family film.

This film restores a balance to humanity and highlights the dignity of ordinary human beings and the hope we all have for happiness and to leave our mark on the world.

Fmovies: 200 people were attending this movie in the theater, when the light went back after the movie was finished, nobody had moved, all the eyes were red. When Jean-Baptiste sings, it just takes you by your guts. The story is fantastic, the music is magic, Jugnot is expectedly grandiose... The picture itself is made "à la" 50s, it's very special but truly desserves the highest awards. I cannot give anything below 10 here. I swear you'll love this movie, if you don't, get back to your pop corn bucket and go and watch that Riddick sh1te, at least you'll get what you desserve.

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This is funny how people get from one extreme to another about this movie. When I saw the movie it was in a Citadelle in an open air cinema by the French Riviera (Villefranche sur Mer, very very nice). The friend I went to see it with said to me: "I give you the tissues now because I predict you will cry like a baby". And I cried like a baby. The story made me think about Sister Act ONLY IN THE STORY!!! A failed musician converting a group of difficult children into a choir... But this version of the story is way above the American one. Gérard Jugnot is really great. I like him very much since he has abandoned his comic roles. I loved him in Le meilleur Espoir Feminin and Monsieur Batignole. I think he's an great actor as he can convey a lot of emotions, from laughter to sincere emotion. At last, the fact that all the children are not professional actors adds to the sincerity of the film which should won at least an Academy Award this year if the Americans still can be sensitive about sincerity...

The Chorus fmovies. Boys as a group are perhaps the least understood human beings among us. Les Choristes invites our understanding of their sensibility, sensitivity, and the ease with which they are treated badly -- in fact, have always been treated badly by institutions, educators and parents. The importance of fathers in their lives and their great need for a surrogate if the natural fathers are missing are beautifully explored in this film. The screenplay and its realization on screen are very effective in showing how the difficult combination of giving boys strong direction and tenderness and finding a way to their hearts can be accomplished. This film helps us understand how the same human creature can be hard and sullen one moment and sweetly spiritual the next, inaccessible one minute and needy the next. It is also an inspiring film for young men preparing to be teachers.

A delicious movie. Something wonderful is going to happen and I am not talking just about the characters of the movie but the spectators. It's so moving and at the same time it is not a sentimental one. The freedom, the excitement, the amazing charm of discovering the life through the music... I don't know French and I can say that the soundtrack is so international that you don't need to understand the words to feel its power, to receive the message...

Very often people agree or disagree with their opinions about a film... I watched the movie with a representative number of persons and all of them found the movie very recommendable and beautiful.

All of us were children and the magic of that unforgettable period of our lives is reflected in this great film.

8 out of 10...

There's an air of romance surrounding wayward boys, particularly in the French tradition, where they tend to be poetic as well as mischievous. In "The Chorus," Christophe Barratier draws on this tradition and adds some lovely vocal sounds. "The Chorus" is about an "internat" or reform school where a new principal who writes music tames his young charges, some naughty, some just abandoned, by teaching them to sing in a boys' chorus. The school director, Rachin (sounds like Nurse Ratched), François Berléand (of Jacquot's "The School of Flesh"), is a prissy sadist who preaches a philosophy of instant punishment for all real or imagined wrongdoing ("action-reaction"); but when the new principal, Clément Mathieu (Gérard Jugnot) shows up with a soft approach to his classes and his supervisory duties, he finds allies among the faculty and staff.

"The Chorus" advances the frequently screened theory that delinquent kids are better charmed than chastened; that if you can find a positive activity they excel in, the misbehavior will die out.

Barratier has had good success with his young actors. The most important boy is the "tête d'ange" (head of an angel), tall, fair-haired Morhange (Jean-Baptiste Maunier), who's often in trouble and refuses to join the choir, till Mathieu catches him singing by himself and discovers his star soloist. Morhange's voice possesses not only a rich natural musicality but the haunting purity only boy sopranos have. Morhange has the most attractive mother, and Mathieu's success in encouraging the boy's singing makes the pudgy, bald man fantasize romance with her -- thus incidentally clearing himself of the suspicion of pedophilia that tends to haunt any all-boys school setting. Mathieu's romantic dream is futile, and he humbly fades away at the story's end, like some Gallic pied piper of boy soprano-dom.

"The Chorus" takes place in post-war France and its topic and look establish immediate links with a bevy of seminal French films. Wayward French boys turn up in boarding schools that are places of both repression and refuge, as you can see in Jean Vigo's school revolution in "Zero for Conduct" (1933). The beloved textbook of the French bad-boy tradition is Alain-Fournier's "Le Grand Meaulnes" (The Wanderer), which was notably filmed by Jean-Pierre Albicocco in 1967. The tradition becomes more autobiographical in Truffaut's 1959 400 Blows, which introduced the director's alter ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud; and in Malle's moving and long-contemplated memoir of a boarding school in wartime, "Au Revoir les Enfants" (1987). Jean Cocteau mythologized a bad-boy idol who haunted him all his life in the Dargélos of "Les Enfants Terribles" (1950), made into yet another classic film by Jean-Pierre Melville. This whole idea has remaining traces in the feral youth Gaspard Ulliel plays in André Téchiné's recent "Strayed." "The Chorus," it is true, is a relatively conventional entry; except for adding music, it rides upon, rather than transcends, the tradition. But it's a warm story with much charm and little pretension.

Barratier himself is a talented musician who, like Mathieu, has drifted into other things. A trained classical guitarist, he won several international competitions after studying at the prestigious École Normale de Musique in Paris, and played professionally for several ye