Les Choristes

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Les Choristes
Les Choristes film poster
Directed by	Christophe Barratier
Produced by	Arthur Cohn, Jacques Perrin, Gérard Jugnot etc
Written by	Christophe Barratier, Philippe Lopes-Curval, etc
Starring	Gérard Jugnot, Jean-Baptiste Maunier, François Berléand
Distributed by	Miramax Films (USA)
Release date(s)	March 17, 2004
Running time	96 min
Language	French
Budget	~ €5,500,000
IMDb profile

Les Choristes (Chorists) also known as The Chorus in English, is a 2004 film directed by Christophe Barratier. The plot is about a passionate music teacher who arrives at a correctional boarding school for boys and transforms their lives through music. The film stars Gérard Jugnot as the teacher, and Jean-Baptiste Maunier as one of his students, a musical prodigy. The movie is based on La Cage aux Rossignols.

The motion picture explores the pain of a child's separation from his parents, and the transcendence of music as the greatest form of expression.

The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film; the song "Vois Sur Ton Chemin" (Look To Your Path) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The movie begins in the present time. Pierre Morhange (Jacques Perrin), an aged world famous French conductor who resides now in America, receives a call from France informing him of his mother's death. Morhange returns to France for the funeral. While at his French home, a middle-aged man appears at his door. Morhange has no idea who the man is, but the stranger eventually reveals himself to be Pépinot (Didier Flamand), one of Morhange's old classmates at the correctional school Fond de L'Etang. they attended back in 1949. Pépinot shows Morhange the journal of Clément Mathieu, their prefect and unoffical choir conductor. Morhange proceeds to read the rest of the journal, and the real story begins.

It's 1949, and Clement Mathieu (Gérard Jugnot) has taken the position of prefect (or student monitor/officer) at the Fond De L'Étang (literally, Bottom of the Pond) school for troubled boys. Middle-aged and resigned to giving up his dream of composing music, Mathieu is still cautiously optimistic. This is despite the alarming attitude of his predecessor as prefect, who doesn't bother hiding how glad he is to leave. Mathieu's predecessor, however, is kind enough to warn him of the more dangerous students at the school.

They include young Pierre Morhange (Jean-Baptiste Maunier), the boy with the angelic face but devilish temperament and Le Querrec (Cyril Bernicot), whose prankster booby trap severely injured the school's elderly custodian. Not all of the kids are malevolent, however, such as diminutive orphan Pepinot (Maxence Perrin), but that makes no difference to the school's strict and unsympathetic headmaster Rachin (Francis Berleand) who has instilled the mantra "Action Equals Reaction" upon the school. He and another adult, Chabert (Kad Merad), generously administer corporal punishment and terms of confinement, but their methods seem ineffective as their wards keep acting up.

After several failed attempts to discipline his students, Mathieu decides to try and get through to them with music. He turns his class into a choir and composes songs for them. He soon manages to capture his students' interest. Just as things are starting to look up for the children, they are joined by two more classmates. Pierre Morhange, who had been in detention when Matthieu started teaching, and Mondain, a special case from the local mental instutite. Though not officially crazy, he is a borderline case with an extremely violent and anti-social attitude. The caretaker at the institute tells Rachin that he wants to study how Montier adjusts to a less strictly controlled environment, but neglects to mention that the boy murdered one of his supervisors at the institute.

Both of the new children become trouble in Mathieu's class. Mondain's blatant ignoring of Mathieu's orders soon causes the other children to follow suit, slipping back into the half-convicts they were before the chorus was started. Morhange refuses to participate in the choir, his hostility toward Mathieu being fuelled by the fact that the new prefect has developed a love interest for Morhange's beautiful single mother.