Source: ForeignAffairs4
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Laura O’Flanagan, PhD Candidate, School of English, Dublin City University
Set in the Oxfordshire village of Ramsden in 1916, The Choral inhabits a world where the war is distant – yet its shadow lies over every street. Many of the young men are gone to the front, their names echoing through the church and village hall. Those left behind hover between waiting and pretending that life continues as before.
The film reunites Alan Bennett’s pen and Nicholas Hytner’s direction for their fourth film together (The Madness of King George, The History Boys, The Lady in the Van). Bennett’s eye for endurance and small absurdities, his distinct blend of humour and heartbreak, lends the story a warmth which threatens but never fully falls into sentimentality.
Determined to keep something of the village’s heart intact, the local choir opens its doors to all. The remaining boys – “fodder for the mill, fodder for the front” – join with nervous energy and untested voices. Around them unfold the small dramas of youth: crushes, jealousies, the thrill of being noticed – all under the dark cloud of war.
At times, the film recalls early Downton Abbey: the lightness of routine belying a deeper unease as the order of things begins to tremble. Hytner’s direction keeps the tone measured, his pacing unhurried, the village life unfolding in laughter across fields, flirtation in the lanes, and the faint hum of something approaching.
Ralph Fiennes, in superb form, is characteristically restrained as Dr Guthrie, the new choirmaster whose time in Germany prompts quiet gossip and complicates his loyalties. Dressed in tweed with a pocket watch gleaming, he brings calm authority tinged with sorrow. Alongside the enemy across the Channel, Guthrie sees the human faces behind the rhetoric of war, and thus he is both insider and outsider.
Beneath his composure runs a conviction that compassion itself has become a form of dissent. When Jacob Dudman’s traumatised soldier laments “life’s fucking shit”, Guthrie replies simply: “So, sing.” It becomes the film’s credo: music as both defiance and survival, a way to hold despair at bay. That spirit finds its fullest expression in Mary (Amara Okereke), whose voice lifts through the air with a brilliance that soars towards the transcendent.
Disappointingly, in a story otherwise so attuned to compassion, the film’s portrayal of women feels thin. The women of Ramsden are treated as narrative currency, their sexuality quietly commodified and offered as recompense for men’s suffering. The Choral would struggle to pass even the most forgiving version of the Bechdel test: the few conversations between women are framed by men’s absence or desire.
The film hints at a worldview in which women and sex are treated as rites of passage, experiences the young men are owed before war denies them adulthood. Yet for all the attentiveness to male sorrow, its compassion remains finely tuned to the loss which binds the village, finding moments of truth despite its blind spots.
While the choir scenes are wonderful and the climactic performance is deeply moving, the film is most affecting in its quietest moments. Jubilant farewells at the railway station are almost immediately shadowed by trains bringing home the wounded. The innocence of departure meets the silence of return, and in between lies everything the village will lose.
When a young woman rejects a soldier newly home, Hytner captures the moment with painful clarity: the war has already cut him off from the life he fought to reclaim. The village photographer (Mark Addy) records the last flicker of innocence, freezing faces that might have stepped from the stanzas of Philip Larkin’s poem MCMXIV “grinning as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark” – still radiant with a trust in life that history will soon betray.
The Choral is both elegy and celebration: a reminder that even in the quietest corners, song can sound like survival – the fragile note of hope that refuses to fade.
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Laura O’Flanagan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. The Choral: this moving first world war film reveals the power of music to transcend despair – https://theconversation.com/the-choral-this-moving-first-world-war-film-reveals-the-power-of-music-to-transcend-despair-269771