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.
