Feelgood movies often lunge for the heartstrings. The Marching Band (originally En fanfare) does so too, but there is finesse here as well, and lovely performances, plus a plot that doesn’t always go where expected. And when it does go where expected it does it so unapologetically and majestically that you might feel like applauding, or even shed a little tear.
It’s soppy. It’s lovely. And it tells an interesting and faceted story. First of all about Thibaut, an orchestral conductor who collapses on the podium one day, goes to the doctor and discovers he has leukaemia. He needs a bone marrow transplant but his sister cannot oblige because, he learns, she is not his biological sister. Thibaut was adopted, it seems, and has a brother he never knew existed, who has grown up without all Thibaut’s advantages. A school cook, Jimmy is a blue-collar guy who works in a job to pay the bills. For fun he plays trombone in a marching band of enthusiastic amateurs, nothing more, doing it for the social aspect as much as anything else.
That’s enough plot for an entire film, but Emmanuel Courcol’s film gets all this onto the screen in a handful of minutes. It’s just the set-up, leaving the screen clear for the main event, a nature-versus-nurture disquisition on life chances and outcomes and a warm and sometimes prickly human drama about two very different brothers getting to know each other.
There is more plot, about Jimmy’s band needing a conductor and Thibaut attempting to fill the gap, and then training up Jimmy – Rocky style – to fill the gap, but it’s done almost as if it doesn’t matter. It does matter, though, it really does, and it’s one of the genius moves of the screenplay – by Courcol and a bunch of others – that it plays magician’s games with Hollywood tropes, and more specifically with the British feelgood movie of the Brassed Off, Full Monty, Saving Grace sort.
There are types here, lots of them, but Benjamin Lavernhe (Thibaut) and Pierre Lottin (Jimmy) make their chalk and cheese brothers united by a love of music unusually deep and spiky. The screenplay leaves things unsaid and relies on its leads to fill the gaps, which they do. Together they are the film, but special mention must also go to Sarah Suco, who plays Jimmy’s ex-partner, who does a lot of background fill-in on Jimmy’s character. Thankless explicatory stuff but done well.
Watching this from the UK, where the workers disunited have wholly been defeated, The Marching Band’s view of labour relations in the 21st century – even the fact that Jimmy’s marching band is a works band affiliated to a coal mine – seem like an anachronism. And its view of working-class decency is rosy-lensed, Ken Loach stuff and maybe a touch one-ply. The case for the other end of the class system is made by unashamed big chunks of Ravel and Mahler and Debussy.
Yadda yadda yadda. It doesn’t really matter. The film generally has nuance. It has characters. It has subjects it wants to get off its chest, about the blindness of social privilege and the crippling of talent by self-imposed restrictions, but most of all it wants to say something about the role of opportunity – Jimmy might have been a professional musician too, he has the talent.
Arriving at a recognisable destination via the scenic route, it’s a story that’s reassuringly familiar and yet unexpected. If you’re not going to watch it because it has subtitles, then more fool you. You’ll miss the big sentimental finish which, I can almost guarantee, will catch you off-guard.
The Marching Band – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
