The Chorus

The Chorus was up for the Foreign Film Oscar that eventually went to Spain’s The Sea Inside, sadly at the expense of the chilling German entry Downfall. The big point in relation to this film though, was that The Chorus, a feelgood French film, won many friends for the fact that it’s a sweet little film that is inoffensive but nicely realised.

A middle-aged music teacher arrives at a strictly-disciplined boarding school where unruly children according to the Headmaster, only respond to strong commands and punishments if they step out of line. Of course the teacher is a kinder soul who believes they will respond to creative things and thus, he forms a choir and finds these unruly boys do have a gentler side if you only treat them with a little respect.

It’s a nice storyline and I’m not going to let on what happens but the main problem with The Chorus is that it seems too quietly manipulative, wanting to prey on your emotions in a very dictated manner. It loses some sense of authenticity too.

The choir are made up of boys who have never sang before but guess what – within only a few sessions, they’re singing complex songs as if they’d been singing them all their lives. There’s also a lolita-style sub-plot where as in Death in Venice the teacher appears to have a soft spot for a particularly attractive young boy but the director shies away from portraying anything other than an adult-child infatuation. Then there’s the headmaster who of course is evil from day one – he might as well have had Baddie inked across his forehead.

Its fine as far as it goes which isn’t very far all-told – its nice to watch and is a gently-told story but being so innocuous, it lacks the spirit to produce on screen something more challenging and infinitely more interesting. I also felt for the boy who seemingly is given one chance to sing, blows it and has to play the ‘music stand’ for the rest of the film – that hardly fits with the idea that this music teacher is a nice man – but of course this being only a sweet story, of course the boy playing the music stand is only too happy to be used as a prop rather than being a part of the choir.

Matt Arnoldi