Choir Review – Ralph Fiennes leads the chorus in Alan Bennett’s admirably unsentimental tale | film

ALane Bennett’s new film, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is a quiet, measured pleasure: an unsentimental but deeply felt drama that subcontracts the actual emotion of Elgar’s music and leaves us with a heartbeat of wit, poignancy and common sense. The music itself is mysteriously glorifying and liberating for society, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment when I say that the chorus reminds me of Victoria Wood’s musical This Day We Sang, about a recording of Purcell’s Nymphs and Shepherds by the Manchester Children’s Choir.

The film is about men in a fictional Yorkshire town during World War I, who are either too old or too young to fight, and the women who have to deal with the men’s repressed emotions and their own feelings. The setting is turned upside down by the arrival of Dr. Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), who will be the choirmaster and direct the Music Society’s annual production; He has scandalized some by the fact that he once lived in Germany and has a searching love for that country’s literature and music – as well as the fact that he is single and has a close friendship with another young man who is now serving abroad.

With German composers such as Bach, Beethoven and Handel unacceptable, Dr. Guthrie proposes to his crew of amateurs a radically new production of Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius,” in which the theme of death is the most heart-wrenching in the circumstances. He received permission from Elgar himself for this performance, although he did not receive his bold new interpretive version.

The humor is delivered with the same conviction and subtlely weighted force as the sadness, and the same goes for this film’s unobtrusive view of sex; Just when you thought this was a great movie, Bennett asks us the question of a young disabled soldier who, now having only one arm, has to learn to masturbate with his other hand and must convince his ex-lover to do it for him. Perhaps this is Bennett’s late style: a wintry comic confession of mortality.