The Choral Parent Guide

Two years into the Great War, mass casualties are eroding morale in Great Britain. People are weary of ill news and need a way to lift their spirits. In the Yorkshire town of Ramsden, community leaders face a new challenge in their attempts to uplift their community. The Choral – the local choir – is in crisis. With so many male singers in the trenches or dead, the choral is in dire need of more vocalists. And when the chorus master announces that he’s enlisted, he also needs to be replaced.

The choral’s directors gather for an emergency meeting and reluctantly agree to offer the job to Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), who has recently returned to Yorkshire after an illustrious career in Germany. His connections in Germany render him suspect in Ramsden, as do his purported atheism and “other proclivities” but desperate times call for desperate measures…

Guthrie’s arrival brings not a wind of change but a gale to the choral. He insists that everyone audition – even long-term choristers – and is determined to swell the choir’s ranks. To that end, he goes to taverns and convalescent homes to recruit any capable vocalists he can find – with a complete disregard for traditional social class distinctions. There’s just one more problem: the choral’s classic favorites are composed by Germans and that raises hackles in the community. Can Guthrie find a piece of music that will please the people of Ramsden, be within his choir’s capabilities, and be relevant to the moment?

The Choral is exactly what I expected it to be: a beautifully filmed, well-acted, well detailed piece of English period cinema. The settings are perfect, the costumes flawless, and the cast composed of talented members of Britain’s enviable acting bench. Be they well known or unknown, everyone in this film turns in a memorable performance, which combined with the soaring music, makes The Choral a (mostly) uplifting film about love, cooperation, community, empathy, and the power of art to touch our hearts and heal our souls.

As much as I enjoyed this lovely film, I was driven crazy by the completely unnecessary negative content that pushed it into a Restricted rating. This movie could easily have been a PG-13 film, or even PG with a bit more effort. As it is, the film’s four f-bombs automatically make it Restricted, but the sexual content is the real issue. Although there are no sex scenes or explicit genitalia, the film features a woman masturbating a man (the activity occurs below the screen but he can be seen panting), and a man trying to pay a woman after having sex. In another scene, a man’s buttocks are visible after he removes his clothes and tries to persuade a woman to sleep with him. In a film so full of rousing refrains and inspiring moments, the negative content strikes a sharp note, grating on the ear and lingering unpleasantly in the air. There’s a lot to like in The Choral, but the editing is sadly off key.