Les Choristes
 Director: Christophe Barratier |
I'm always a complete sucker for movies about smart and/or talented children (Home Alone, School of Rock, Sound of Music, to name a few) - more specifically, movies that chart the development of delinquent and hopeless cases into smart and/or talented children. Apart from simply being a brilliant movie, Les Choristes fulfills this rather vicarious penchant in every way. Beautifully shot, infused with that especially French quality of deep introspection captured on screen, marvellously touching main protagonists, and best of all, it's about music! Set in a school for delinquents, the entire horde of unruly young boys are lamentably ill-disciplined and utterly dead to the world outside - the despair of all previous supervisors - until their new supervisor, Clement Mathieu, enters their lives and turns the school around with choral music and firm, stubborn love. The more cynical of our populace might deride such sentimentality as mawkish, cliched, trite, etc; to such deadened, heartless souls, I extend a warm, friendly vas te faire encule. Nonetheless, like many French films I've seen, Les Choristes has a distinctly open-ended quality - lots of loose ends are left untied or insufficiently dispensed with, and for the Hollywood-conditioned, accustomed as they are to neat, spoon fed resolutions, this might be the one irritant in an otherwise unimpeachable film. But, as again I feel with many French films, the ambivalence of resolution lends just the right amount of...of....of a certain je ne sais quois, if I may, to the story - almost as though one were to emerge at the end from the film's enclosed world with a shrug, a small smile, and a gentle, thoughtful "C'est la vie". |