The Chorus

Christophe Barratier's The Chorus (French: Les Choristes) was the surprise commercial phenomenon of 2004 in France: it grossed over €77 million and sold over 8.6 million tickets at the domestic box office, becoming the second-highest-grossing French film of the year and one of the largest French theatrical successes of the decade. It earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the 77th Academy Awards in 2005 and a second nomination for Best Original Song (Bruno Coulais's Vois sur ton chemin).

The film is a loose remake of La Cage aux rossignols (1945), Jean Dréville's wartime French feature about a music teacher at a school for difficult children. Barratier — the nephew of La Cage aux rossignols producer Jacques Perrin — co-produced the film with his uncle and adapted the story with co-writer Philippe Lopes-Curval, updating the period to 1949. The cast pairs Gérard Jugnot, François Berléand and Kad Merad — established figures in the French popular comedy tradition — with the breakthrough screen debut of twelve-year-old Jean-Baptiste Maunier as the choir's solo voice.

The choral score by Bruno Coulais, performed by Les Petits Chanteurs de Saint-Marc and arranged for the film's vocal solos, became a major commercial success in its own right: the soundtrack album sold over a million copies in France and over four million worldwide. Maunier's continuing career as a singer (signing with Mercury Records as a teenager) was launched directly from the production. The film is now widely cited in French film-school discussions of mass-audience cinema as a textbook case of a sleeper hit driven by sentimental melody and word-of-mouth.