The chill, bleak morning Clément Mathieu arrives to take up his post as class supervisor at a private boarding school lost in the countryside, a small boy is waiting just inside the locked iron gates. Every Saturday, he hopes his father will finally come for him. Every other day is a Saturday in the child's mind, but his parents are dead.
"Action. Reaction!"
Each crime brings its punishment, even when the offences lie purely in troubled adolescent heads and hearts confined largely to dully furnished classrooms and spartan dormitories. The man Clément is replacing shows him an armful of surgical stitches. The stab wound was the reaction of the boy from whom he confiscated a packet of cigarettes. While the response to the assault is short of police intervention, the culprit spends much of his time in the lock-up or doing menial chores.
Clément, a onetime music teacher and discreet amateur composer superbly played by Gérard Jugnot, is set straight to work with the benefit of grim good luck wishes, a shortlist of names of the most rebellious boys and a sour introduction to the despotic headmaster of the school.
A modest new masterpiece of French cinema begins with bad news and a light classical waltz in modern New York, but the real story is set in the Auvergne of 1949, when much of France remained traumatised by enemy occupation and war.
On the remarkable official site of 'Les Choristes' (Fr.), director Christophe Barratier outlines the then prevailing psychology of child reform, which is certainly "disturbing today", adding that "as in all periods of crisis, parents had other priorities ahead of educating their children."
Such methods of "social reinsertion" (a term still employed but as little practised or thought out in some post-conflict countries in our time) prevailed well into the 1960s, along with much of the austerity Jugnot, like me, remembers from his own schooldays, the everlasting smell of chalk dust and the "mouldy memories".
With a solid supporting adult cast, Jugnot, the teenagers and the music they come to make together are the real stars of this flawlessly paced and deeply heart-warming movie. The score is partly the original work of Bruno Coulais (Amazon.fr only for the soundtrack at present), who won fame when he composed the music for such outstanding and varied achievements as 'Himalaya' (1999) and 'Le Peuple Migratoire' ('Winged Migration,' 2001) .
In his début as director for the general public, Barratier reveals another considerable talent by himself contributing two of the key songs performed by the chorale, in reality the Petits Chanteurs de Saint-Marc.
The 12-year-old lad from this ensemble based near Lyon whose phenomenal voice convinced film-maker and producers alike that they could have a small miracle on their hands was Jean-Baptiste Maunier. He also landed the difficult child star role of Pierre Morhange, whom we first meet some 50 years later as one of the world's most acclaimed orchestral conductors.
From half-remembered trailers, I'd wrongly expected a tale of the hard-won triumph of shared music-making over life's adversities on a par with the well-earned box-office success of the bitter-sweet 'Brassed Off' (1996, IMDb), the Yorkshire mining band tragi-comedy of ruptured families and the impact of Britain's Thatcher-ruled years when so-called "liberal capitalism" meant get rich quick for the few, along with everybody else for themselves in the failed vision of a classless society.
Had he set his own film in contemporary France, Barratier, it turns out, might have set it in the urban ghettos of some inner cities and hopeless suburbs. Then we could have got something like 'Music of the Heart' (1999, IMDb), whose syrupy title might have made me miss Meryl Streep's striking teacher's struggle to bring the violin and orchestral discipline to Harlem street kids.
But in 'Les Choristes', for all the attention to telling details of hard times, politics and most aspects of family life are kept well out of the picture, with the exception of the relationship between Morhange and his working single mother, Clément's disappointment in his own love-life and the paternal affection he introduces, along with the redemptive strength of music, to an institution run like a prison camp.
On screen in France since March, the film co-written by Barratier and Philippe Lopes-Curval suffers no lack of drama in a taut plot, where Clément's humanist principles encounter many obstacles. When headmaster Rachin (François Berléand) acts on his initial misgivings about the whole absurd enterprise of trying to bring a team spirit and a shared passion to lost adolescent misfits for whom he has no love but a sliding scale of contempt, the chorale becomes an explicit act of resistance and Clément discovers some unexpected allies.
The language of music infuses the narrative and some formidable camera and lighting work ranging from abrupt allegro to seamless successions of broad-measured slow movements with a faultless coherence.
To shoot successful winter scenes in last summer's heat wave must have been tough enough for all involved, but such skilled visual mastery of a transition from metronome monotony to a summer coda is more remarkable still.
Jugnot and others, including Berléand as erratically obsequious bully, bring some highly comic, often wordless gracenotes to the unfolding of the story. Which, all told, is one vast flashback. A flashback in Morhange's memory, where he comes to recognise his lifelong career as the repayment of a debt to a hero unsung for decades. A man for whom music, like his compassion, was one of the fruits of love.
It's been a long while since I've watched and listened to a story where when the final credits had rolled, I felt quite ready to see the film and hear more all over again. At once.
I couldn't. But I shall and 'Les Choristes' -- particularly as a writer-director's first -- takes an easy 8.5/10. A major box-office success at home, this is a movie worthy of international attention.
10:38:03 PM link 
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