The Marching Band review – tender French concert bromance gets out the trombones

French film-maker Emmanuel Courcol serves up a good-natured heartwarmer with immoderate syrup, but besides 2 watchable and robust pb performances. For British audiences, The Marching Band mightiness telephone to caput Brassed Off, The Full Monty oregon Billy Elliot, movies from the heartland which dared to imagination that showbusiness oregon taste assemblage adventures tin someway past the wreckage of concern capitalism.

Benjamin Lavernhe plays Thibaut, a distinguished and delicate orchestra conductor who collapses mid-rehearsal successful Paris and is told helium has leukaemia and needs a bony marrow transplant donor. Thibaut is adopted and this means tracking down his biologic member retired successful the boondocks: mill idiosyncratic Jimmy, played by the formidable Pierre Lottin (recently seen successful François Ozon’s When Autumn Falls), whose acquisition for deadpan drama truly lone gets escaped rein astatine the precise opening of the film.

Thibaut has the tricky task of asking idiosyncratic who is simply a full alien if helium wouldn’t caput donating his bony marrow. But this fraught concern reveals – a small programmatically, possibly – that Jimmy has a existent philharmonic talent, similar him, plays trombone successful the raucous mill set and nurses a passionateness for jazz connected vinyl. Thibault sees successful Jimmy a imaginativeness of what his ain beingness could person been without his adoptive mother’s comfy middle-class background, and sees Jimmy and himself done the lens of class, authorities and society, and not the expected destiny of axenic talent.

But past Jimmy’s set needs a conductor … well, determination are nary prizes for guessing what happens next. Director and co-writer Courcol has to negociate the crippled truthful that the question of Thibaut’s ain affectional beingness and relationships is much oregon little forgotten, but the bromance chemistry works good capable and the last performance encore is touching.