Troubled youths find inspiration in music--familiar turf but beautifully rendered

Rating: 7/10 (18 June 2015)

The Chorus (2004)
How many French movies will there be that are about boyhood and innocence lost? (Including great films, like Truffaut's "Pocket Change" and "400 Blows" and Louis Malle's "Au Revoir Les Enfants.") Out of this national necessity (and the admission of the first-time director) comes this rather nice if not quite great movie, building on the same foundations.
A teacher is newly assigned to a country private school for troubled boys. He is secretly a composer, and finds a way to write choral music for the boys, who learn to sing extremely well. And so in the barest most touching way we see the vulnerability and possibility of the boys and the teacher, too. And of course the meanness of the schoolmaster. It's classic great stuff so well done you don't mind the familiar ways it works on you.
Well, I have to now say that this movie is a kind of remake of a 1945 French original, "La cage aux rossignols." Even the title (The Cage of Nightengales) shows a poetic brilliance that is somehow just lacking here, but in the 2004 version the production values are higher, and the slightly deadpan quality of the lead (Gerard Jugnot) is compelling. Either way the story, and the simple truth of it, is worth seeing. (By the way, "The Chorus" is easily found streaming and on Youtube whereas the 1945 version is hard to find.)
Beyond the charming idea of delinquents becoming choirboys (and one of them later a famous conductor, which you learn in the first scene), the movie has a kind of warm confirmation that people can be good, and that appreciation of love, and love itself, always abounds. The last scenes will prove this, if you give this a go.
What finally holds this film down to earth is not the acting or the music or the wonderful setting in post-war provincial France. It's the story, which we've seen before, and which oddly takes no new turn at all here. It doesn't mean it's not a good story or a well made movie, not one bit. But you'll know when it starts pretty who the good guys are and the bad, and how it will more or less turn out. In that one way, the original at least is, well original.