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Join Telegram ChannelAfter being presented at the Cannes Film Festival, the film was screened at the Angoulême Festival.
This year, the Cannes Film Festival rolled out the red carpet at the Harmonie Municipale des Mineurs de Lallaing (Nord) for the screening In Fanfareselected in the Cannes Première category, in which the musicians play their own roles. At the end of the session, they even went on stage to perform a piece by Charles Aznavour. This is what happens when you make the seventh art and music rhyme.
Eight years after his first feature film, Ceasefireand four years later A Triumphalso presented on the Croisette, Emmanuel Courcol returns with a third production oscillating between social film and comedy: In Fanfare.
On one side, we find Thibaut, played by Benjamin Lavernhe of the Comédie Française (The Meaning of Celebration, The Speech, Abbé Pierre: A Life of Struggles), is an internationally renowned conductor. On the other, Jimmy, played by Pierre Lottin – whose career is no longer limited to being Wilfried Tuche and who has already collaborated with the filmmaker on his previous feature film – a school canteen employee and trombone player in a brass band in the North of France. At first glance, everything separates them, but two things unite them: music and blood. Because yes, the two men are in reality brothers who were separated at birth and adopted by two separate families, one bourgeois and the other middle class.
Suffering from leukemia, the conductor asks the woman who then believes to be his sister for a bone marrow donation. Impossible, because the two are incompatible. Opposite him, the one who turns out to be in reality his brother and who only responds with a series of swear words. A comical situation that underlines the whole comic aspect of the film.
But make no mistake. Behind the smiles lies a moving drama where music is at the heart of life and the meaning we give it – a way to repair the injustice of fate and escape from the modest environment in which we find ourselves.
In Fanfare was born from a trip to Tourcoing during which Emmanuel Courcol met a brass band and a troupe of majorettes:
“No one could read music, not even the conductor. The entire repertoire of the band was made up of pieces that he adapted by ear. He would break down the parts by section, and the others would reproduce what they had heard. After the rehearsal, we all went to his house for a drink and seeing these people of all ages so warmly gathered together I could realize the importance of music and the band as a social and emotional bond: it is a family and a way of life, a remedy for isolation, the omnipresence of screens and our dematerialized world.”
The film was presented on Friday at the Francophone Film Festival in Angoulême in a cinema-concert session, and will be released in theaters on November 27.