Alan Bennett’s new film, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is a quiet and consistent pleasure: an unsentimental but deeply felt drama which subcontracts actual passion to the music of Elgar and leaves us with a heartbeat of wit, poignancy and common sense. Music itself mysteriously exalts and redeems the community, and I mean it as the highest possible praise when I say that The Choral reminds me of Victoria Wood’s musical That Day We Sang, about the recording of Purcell’s Nymphs and Shepherds by Manchester Children’s Choir.
The film is about men in a fictional Yorkshire town during the first world war who are variously too old or too young to fight, and the women who have to deal with the menfolk’s repressed emotions and their own. The place is upended by the arrival of Dr Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes) who is to be the choirmaster, directing the music society’s annual production; he scandalises some with the fact that he once lived in Germany and has a scholar’s love of that country’s literature and music – as well as the fact that he is a bachelor who had a close friendship with another young man now serving overseas.
German composers such as Bach, Beethoven and Handel being unacceptable, Dr Guthrie proposes to his ragtag crew of amateurs a radical new production of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, its theme of death being the more heartwrenching in the circumstances. He gets permission from Elgar himself for this performance, though not his daringly interpretive new variations.
The humour is delivered with the same conviction and discreetly weighted force as the sadness, and the same goes for this film’s determinedly unbowdlerised view of sex; just when you thought this was a picturesque movie, Bennett gives us the question of a young disabled soldier having to learn to masturbate with the other hand now that he only has one arm, and having to persuade his now ex-sweetheart to do it for him. Perhaps this is Bennett’s late style: a wintry, comic acknowledgment of mortality.
