Songs from the heart

I borrowed three DVDs last week to watch over the weekend. I only finished two of them; the third one, I fell asleep after the first 15 minutes. I already made a review for the first one, City of Gods, so I’d be tackling the second foreign film (non-Hollywood, that is).



Les Choristes (The Choir) released in 2004 is a French film directed by Christophe Barratier. Set at the end of the 1940s in rural France, an unemployed music professor, Clement Mathieu (Gérard Jugnot), accepted a supervisory post in a boarding school of rehabilitation for minors. Mathieu was quite shocked to discover the repressive system – with a heavy-hand for punishments – applied by the headmaster, Rachin (François Berléand). In order to get through the antics of the bunch of wayward boys, this new professor introduced to them the power of music.

This is your usual ‘one teacher that made a difference’ kind of movie – a French Dead Poets’ Society – yet it is a film filled with tenderness, beauty, purity and of hope. You can feel the sullenness of the boys’ struggle for independence and self-expression. The soundtrack of the young boys singing, written by Bruno Coulais and features the angelic voice of Jean-Paul Bonnaire, who plays Morhange in the film, will stick to the viewers long after they have finished watching it.