Alan Bennet’s worlds are filled with a love for the subtle hypocrisy of ordinary people, exposed without malice. His picture of a 1916 northern town far from the front lines of a patriotic war is lively and sunny yet clouded by the distant conflict. It is a community in mourning with sons away, missing, or dead. Those men that remain anxiously awaiting the day their conscription papers arrive. Feelings in the film are mixed throughout. Nativity, lust for glory and travel consume those innocent of the conflict while those who return are so visibly broken by the front they leave behind. Patriotism for the ‘land of hope and glory’ against the wretched Fritz plays loud on the tongues of village folk and dissent is taken as cowardice.
The Choral, a local organisation of singers, unites our medley of village characters and quietly transcends their social order through art. The art in question being, the still living, Edward Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius”, the story of a man who dies and awaits his judgment in purgatory. (The only non-German choral any of the group can think of.) People throughout the village are conscripted into this chorus. As a result, we don’t find ourselves lumped with just one character but the whole choral. What is granted to us is a tender cross section of WW1 society from mill owner to baker’s son. Whether in the pub, infirmary, or church, all find a voice and a community, united by art and an instinctual love of music seems greater than any patriotism.
The cinematography of this film is tactfully sharp. With the matt colours of the era adding to the textures of a bygone world: the tearoom, box cameras, bicycles, flat caps, lake swimming. Even sex makes a quiet appearance of human tenderness in a difficult age.
What comes together is one of Bennet’s gems: patient with the ordinary in unordinary times.
