Film Club: Les Choristes

Following a suggestion from one of our Twitter followers we watched Les Choristes (The Chorus for you monolinguals out there!) and, needless to say, loved it.

There's a reason we're fond of French cinema. We rarely watch a French film that doesn't have an exceptional retelling of human trials and tribulations. On top of that, it's in French. We think (as native English speakers) that the French language sounds significantly nicer than English. Phonetically it's a more pleasing language and what a film to show it off!

"Difficult" boys deserve nothing but coal.

Without throwing out any real spoilers, the film centres around a school for "difficult" boys. "Difficult" meaning generally naughty. The protagonist is their teacher who eventually arranges to form a choral group with the students in his class.

Phonaesthetically speaking, the language works well with singing and the film passes through the classic no-frills approach of storytelling often found in most of our favourite French films. It mixes the good with the bad and comes out with a nice emotional range and a good pace that makes it very easy to watch.

We'd advise anyone who speaks French to definitely watch it. Given the subject matter, it's very universal so we reckon it'd be a good shout even with subtitles for those who don't speak French. Hopefully there are no dubbed versions out there because as we previously mentioned in our dubbing or subtitling post, subtitles are the way to go, especially in a film with audio as important as this one.

Have you seen Les Choristes? What did you think of it? Tell us below in the comments.