(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)French cinema on song again
Boys and girls are queuing to join local choirs after seeing this year’s smash hit homegrown movie.
Hugh Schofield reports from Paris
France has discovered a passion for choral singing thanks to a new film which looks set to take over from Amelie as the latest export success for Gallic nostalgia-chic.
A first feature for director Christophe Barratier, Les Choristes – The Choirboys, in English – has been the smash hit of the year in France, with ticket sales of 6.7 million that outstrip even the latest Harry Potter production. The sound-track, featuring a dozen songs performed in cherubic mass-treble, is topping the album charts with some 500,000 copies sold.
Across the country choir-masters have been inundated by applications from boys and girls who say their lives have been changed by the music, while Jean-Baptiste Maunier – the angelic 13-year-old from Lyon who is the film’s leading voice – has become an overnight star.
“The film has made choral singing fashionable. It has succeeding in winning over young people who had no previous musical culture,” says Jean-François Duchamp, president of the Federation of Petits Chanteurs, which comprises more than 100 church and cathedral choirs.
Starring one of France’s most popular actors, Gerard Jugnot, as Clement Mathieu, a humble music teacher who uses singing to redeem the lost souls at an authoritarian reform school in post-war France, Les Choristes is a re-make of a little-known 1945 French film called La Cage Aux Rossignols or The Cage Of Nightingales.
When Mathieu arrives at the Fond de L’Etang [Bottom Of The Pond] school in 1949, the boys – many of them war orphans – are running riot under the brutal but ineffective rule of the vile headmaster Rachin. Gradually Mathieu wins their trust, and, by showing what they can achieve together in a choir, brings a new spirit into their lives. One of his pupils, Maunier, eventually wins a scholarship to a conservatoire.
Various explanations have been adduced for the film’s remarkable success – its total lack of sex and violence, its setting in a long-vanished land of short trousers and simpler values, the hopeful message it offers for children in today’s more troubled times – all of which should carry Les Choristes to new success abroad.
“Our first soundings are excellent, and we are counting on a new Amelie ,” says Natalie Villette of the international department of Pathé Distribution, which has sold the film to scores of countries round the world. It comes out in Britain in January, and in the US at the end of this year (though presumably under a name other than The Choirboys, which was a violent 1979 cop pic set in Los Angeles, from a novel by Joseph Wambaugh).
“There is a real magic. It appeals to every generation – children, the 15-to-25s, and older people with memories of the era. And just like with Amelie, you come out feeling good,” she says. Amelie, which came out in 2001, was about the adventures of a whimsical young woman in an air-brushed Paris and became the biggest French film export of all time.
Above all, it is the singing that has captured the imagination in France, and though some choral professionals are sniffy about the commercial nature of Bruno Coulais’s score, all are delighted by the publicity given to a pastime which they say has been in steady but unreported growth for several years. “Each June I audition around 50 eight-year-olds, and normally when I ask them to sing a song they know they give me Frères Jacques or something like that. This year nearly every single one sang me a song from Les Choristes. That is how popular it is,” says François Polgar, who heads the choir of Sainte-Croix de Neuilly outside Paris.
France used to have a tradition of choir schools attached to cathedrals, much as Britain has, but the link was brutally cut in the revolution and it is only in the post-war era that it has been revived. In the past 20 years, a nationwide network of non-religious choirs has also been built up with the help of regional cultural funding, with the result that there are now some 25,000 choirs singing a repertoire that includes jazz, variety and – increasingly – gospel.
According to Thierry Thi bault, artistic director of the À Coeur Joie confederation of choirs, there has been a gradual increase of applications to choirs over several years, in which the sudden rush that followed the release of Les Choristes will prove to be a strong but temporary blip.
“Personally I do not think the film was a masterpiece,” says Thibault, who in August is directing the international Choralies 2004 festival at Vaison-la-Romaine.
“But I am delighted that it has brought choral singing out of the restrictive image it had of being purely religious. It was too closely tied to the church, but the film showed a whole other side.”
As for the reasons why, in an age dominated by pop music, television and sport, so many children should feel the pull of the conductor’s baton, Thi bault is in no doubt.
“Today we live in a civilisation that isolates. Internet, Gameboys, television – they create activities that are in essence solitary.
“But man needs company. And to sing in a choir, all that you need to bring along is yourself.”
18 July 2004
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while searching for info i came across a french site dedicated to a variety of child stars.
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Choristes, Les (2004) (Read 6,444 times)
