Die Kinder des Monsieur Mathieu

A child in the enlightenment, can meet a good teacher, is really a very lucky thing.

The locale for this French sub-titled film is a locked fortress-like school for poor boys from broken homes, WWII orphans and juvenile delinquents, very Dickensian in feel. The principal of the school,is a detestable man who abuses students and teachers equally. You've seen the plot before, of course, and some of the characters are "stock" sorts. But the acting of the lead, the teacher who "saves" the students by luring them into singing, is portrayed charmingly by Gerard Jugnot. Mostly bald, a bit stocky and no beauty, he is nonetheless disarming. The boy soprano, Jean-Baptiste Maunier, has a wonderful voice, and the chorus is splendid. Particularly fine was the score, almost entirely original, by Bruno Colais. I was looking for something inspiring on this bitter cold inaugural day in the U.S. Les Choristes made my spirit soar and reaffirmed that kindness, generosity of self and the gift of music still have the power to change people's lives.

The excellent film "The Choir" takes us back to a France of the past where the director Christophe Barratier and Philippe Lopes-Curval place their story about a school for problem children.

In a way, we have seen similar situations where a good teacher is the catalyst for turning around a group of unruly students into good and productive young men and women. Mathieu Clement, is such a man. His kindness toward the children is returned to him by the students, as they respond to the way he teaches music to motivate and interest them. M. Clement has a keen sense of how to deal with the students; instead of the hard line approach the principal, Rachin, insists in dealing with them, he has other ways to make them change.

The music created by the film director, M. Barratier, and Bruno Coulais, gives the film the right tone. We also hear a song by Rameau, "La Nuit", which is sung with such sweetness that it disarms us and get us into the right mood for enjoying "The Choir" even more.

The film owes a great deal to Gerard Jugnot, who plays the kind teacher who sees possibilities among all these kids. His take on Mathiew Clement is the right one, because the children see in him someone that is the opposite of the other teachers and the mean principal. As the director of the school, Francois Berleand does a good job in portraying this egotistical man who can't see what his own cruelty is doing to the young people in his charge.

The children are as sweet as one expects them to be. Especially Jean Baptiste Maunier, who plays the young Pierre Morhange. Also an angelic Maxence Perrin enchants the viewer as the young orphan Pepinot. Marie Bunel plays Pierre's mother well.

This film is music to the ears of viewers, young and old.

Spoilers

Taking France by storm this summer, Les choristes purportedly led to a surge in applications to join choirs all over the country. The magic is unquestionably in the music, but I'll come to that later.

The success of Les choristes as a film (with or without the divine music) lies in its not trying to be anything more than what it is, a simple tale that opens up to you instead of manipulating you. You'll find neither heart-breaking poignancy nor rousing heroism. Within the short duration of a school term or two he spent with the somewhat notorious boarding school, teacher and musician Clement Mathieu had his modest ambition fulfilled, of having a choir sing the music he wrote, then moved along to a continuously modest life of teaching and music. Talented protégé Pierre Morhange did achieve fame and success, but we have essentially been spared laboured scenes of Titanic struggles or exuberant jubilation. To ensure that I'm not misleading towards the other extreme, let me hasten to add that Les choristes does touch our hearts. It does this gently, sensibly.

But in the end, it's the music. Purely the celestial beauty of the music alone will brings tears to the appreciative audiences' eyes. The story is touching. The character are likable. But the ultimate magic is the choir and boy soprano Jean-Baptiste Maunier chosen from two thousand auditions. Such a magical choice.

There's an air of romance surrounding wayward boys, particularly in the French tradition, where they tend to be poetic as well as mischievous. In "The Chorus," Christophe Barratier draws on this tradition and adds some lovely vocal sounds. "The Chorus" is about an "internat" or reform school where a new principal who writes music tames his young charges, some naughty, some just abandoned, by teaching them to sing in a boys' chorus. The school director, Rachin (sounds like Nurse Ratched), François Berléand (of Jacquot's "The School of Flesh"), is a prissy sadist who preaches a philosophy of instant punishment for all real or imagined wrongdoing ("action-reaction"); but when the new principal, Clément Mathieu (Gérard Jugnot) shows up with a soft approach to his classes and his supervisory duties, he finds allies among the faculty and staff.

"The Chorus" advances the frequently screened theory that delinquent kids are better charmed than chastened; that if you can find a positive activity they excel in, the misbehavior will die out.

Barratier has had good success with his young actors. The most important boy is the "tête d'ange" (head of an angel), tall, fair-haired Morhange (Jean-Baptiste Maunier), who's often in trouble and refuses to join the choir, till Mathieu catches him singing by himself and discovers his star soloist. Morhange's voice possesses not only a rich natural musicality but the haunting purity only boy sopranos have. Morhange has the most attractive mother, and Mathieu's success in encouraging the boy's singing makes the pudgy, bald man fantasize romance with her -- thus incidentally clearing himself of the suspicion of pedophilia that tends to haunt any all-boys school setting. Mathieu's romantic dream is futile, and he humbly fades away at the story's end, like some Gallic pied piper of boy soprano-dom.

"The Chorus" takes place in post-war France and its topic and look establish immediate links with a bevy of seminal French films. Wayward French boys turn up in boarding schools that are places of both repression and refuge, as you can see in Jean Vigo's school revolution in "Zero for Conduct" (1933). The beloved textbook of the French bad-boy tradition is Alain-Fournier's "Le Grand Meaulnes" (The Wanderer), which was notably filmed by Jean-Pierre Albicocco in 1967. The tradition becomes more autobiographical in Truffaut's 1959 400 Blows, which introduced the director's alter ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud; and in Malle's moving and long-contemplated memoir of a boarding school in wartime, "Au Revoir les Enfants" (1987). Jean Cocteau mythologized a bad-boy idol who haunted him all his life in the Dargélos of "Les Enfants Terribles" (1950), made into yet another classic film by Jean-Pierre Melville. This whole idea has remaining traces in the feral youth Gaspard Ulliel plays in André Téchiné's recent "Strayed." "The Chorus," it is true, is a relatively conventional entry; except for adding music, it rides upon, rather than transcends, the tradition. But it's a warm story with much charm and little pretension.

Barratier himself is a talented musician who, like Mathieu, has drifted into other things. A trained classical guitarist, he won several international competitions after studying at the prestigious École Normale de Musique in Paris, and played professionally for several years. But in 1991 he joined Galatée films to train under his uncle, the renowned actor, producer and writer Jacques Perrin -- who bookends "The Chorus" as a Morhange who has grown up into a famous classical conductor. For the next decade Barratier was an associate producer and collaborated with Perrin on "Children of Lumière," "Microcosmos," "Himalaya" and "Winged Migration." Now he has turned his hand to fiction and directed his own film, with success. There is a risk of preciosity and sweetness, mostly avoided by the dryness of both Mathieu and Rachin as characters, as well as the surviving wickedness of the boys, especially an arch bad-boy, Mondain (Grégory Gatignol). The point of view is Mathieu's and the mature Morhange's, so the film doesn't go as deep into the boys' psyches as it goes into their voice boxes.

The director is well connected. He's the son of film actress Eva Simonet and besides his uncle his grandparents were also theater people. The Chorus was top box office in France after its release in March 2004. The French critical reception was pretty mixed, and the film's been reviled by some in the United States as (in one writer's words) "unbelievably inane, saccharine, and derivative"; "all smooth, nutrient-free clichés." Even thumbs-up king Roger Ebert didn't like it: "this feels more like a Hollywood wannabe than a French film," he wrote. "Where's the quirkiness, the nuance, the deeper levels?" But it's really a cleanly made, simple, humanistic, and satisfying little film with far less pandering than its critics claim, and whether we like it or not, it's the French Best Foreign Oscar entry, and the little chorus is likely to perform " Vois sur ton chemin" on Awards night (if their voices haven't changed). The relatively minimal mise-en-scène and the period setting link it more with its classic film antecedents than with the overproduced "Very Long Engagement" (Jeunet's film's Oscar nominations are for décor and photography). Derivative and conventionally themed? Yes. Barratier has acknowledged "The Chorus's" inspiration in an earlier film, "La Cage aux Rossignols" (The Nightingales' Cage, 1945), which has the same premise -- and anyone can name a long list of movies about teachers who charm their wayward flock. None of them feels -- or sounds -- quite like this movie, though. And the boys do their own singing: the "tête d'ange" really has the "voix d'ange." American reviewers, missing the nuances, plug Les Choristes into "Mr. Holland's Opus" or "Dead Poets Society" and find it stereotypically schmaltzy. The gentler French critics don't see those crude comparisons and are able to call it "un beau film" and find in it a satisfying example of "cinéma populaire." We can too if we open up to it.