So I went to watch Les Choristes on Tuesday. I ended up going on my own. Couldn’t be bothered to wait around. There’s only so much of the waiting game one can play in life, and I seriously think this principle belongs to things major and minor. On the flip side, I suppose you could say patience and perseverance pays off. But I am by nature impatient and somewhat rash. Waiting annoys me.
But I digress.
Set in France in 1949, Les Choristes (The Choir Boys) is a charming French film about a group of boys who form a choir in a boarding school called Le Fond de l’Etang (meaning the bottom of the pond) for orphans, boys from broken homes and juvenile delinquents.
The film opens with a famous conductor Pierre Morhange receiving a phone call notifying him of his mother’s death in France. From New York, he makes his way back to the quaint and idyllic village of his childhood.
On returning home, he is paid a visit by a childhood classmate, Pepinot, who hands him an old diary left behind for him by their music teacher Clement Mathieu in their old boarding school.
As Pierre flips the diary, we’re transported back in time to see the events unfold through Mathieu’s eyes. A talented but unrecognised and jaded musician, Mathieu ends up finding work as a supervisor in Le Fond de l’Etang. He is disgusted by the principal’s brutal disciplinary measures but is helpless. The boys are also rebellious and rowdy, having been always dismissed as being useless and beyond redemption by the principal.
Mathieu however, decides to try an experiment–he attempts to use music to tame the savage beasts. Though having previously vowed never to take up music again, Mathieu decides to use music to help the boys by getting them to form a choir. Though reluctant participants at first, the boys soon warm to the music and are practising hard, with their discipline improving along the way. Amongst them, Mathieu discovers that Pierre Morhange, a single child of an unwed mother, has the voice of an angel and decides to nurture his talent.
Pierre, showing immense interest and talent, is soon singing all the solo parts of the songs that Mathieu painstakingly writes for his charges every night. The boys’ diligence extends to practising at night secretly in their dormitory when the mean principal decides to disband the choir.
The storyline is nothing ground breaking, as there have been numerous films on teacher-student relationships. What this film has however, is a charming cast of characters which though rather stereotypical, are still nonetheless absolutely charming.
There are many touching moments in the film–when Mathieu tells his class to inform their parents about the visiting hours, one boy says to him that he has no parents. Pepinot, the five-year-old orphan whose parents were killed in the Nazi Occupation, keeps standing at the school gate in the belief that his father will come to get him as no one has the heart to tell him his parents have died. Instead they tell him that his father will come on Saturday, and this lie is repeated week after week.
Credit has to be given to the fine acting by the boys in helming this film. Every one of them is brilliant in their respective roles. The teenager who acts as Pierre Morhange looks set to be the next French James Dean of his generation with his soulful eyes and brooding good looks. And what a voice he has!
Watch the film also for its fantastic music–there is something haunting and soul-stirring about choral music. The boys did a magnificent job in bringing out the meaning of the lyrics of the songs. On many occasions in the film, I felt myself rather overwhelmed by the emotions being stirred in me as I listened to the boys sing.
Les Choristes is a gem of a film!