Maybe for the first time in my life I feel that I’m in the right place

Maybe for the first time in my life I feel that I’m in the right place.”. Shot near the Vichy state’s seat of government and set just after the war, it includes a dictatorial headmaster, Rachin, who Barratier acknowledges could be interpreted as a Petain figure. Yet in the final script, he opted to excise any explicit references to war and collaboration “Maybe it was a little too obvious,” he says. “Not all the collaborators were monsters, and not all the ordinary people were very good.” Instead, for Barratier, The Chorus represents an examination of his own unhappy time at boarding school, where he went from the age of six till 10 after his parents divorced.He has written one of the themes used in the film, and has begun, tentatively, to pick up the guitar again as a hobby.

But I don’t think people really listen to the critics now, except when they are in unanimity.”You need a part of the industry to be experimental,” he continues “That is very important But you cannot exist just by accepting subsidies Sometimes we forget this. To me, the best way to protect French film is to make successful films.”The Chorus is a sweet, hanky-dabber of a film, and one which brushes with the issues of the time but chooses not to engage with them fully. Sometimes, if a movie pleased the audience it made the critics suspicious. Unfortunately, I discovered by the time I was 21 that all my friends who were violinists, celloists, and oboists were playing in chamber orchestras. But there are no classical guitars in orchestras, so if you are a guitarist you are condemned to give solo concerts. And there are not a lot of them, and they are not very popular.”Barratier recalls the years when Julian Bream and John Williams regularly filled 2,500 seat venues in Paris “Now it’s all over There are no more concerts in those big venues. Everything is in little churches.” Despite winning competitions and prizes, Barratier feared he would end up being a guitar teacher rather than a guitarist.

So one afternoon while holidaying in the South of France he decided to give up “All my family were very shocked,” he says “But I was really tired of practising six hours a day I was 26. Everybody else was on the boat, the ship, the beach – and I was practising. Was I working so hard just to end up as a guitar teacher in the Paris suburbs? I felt very depressed. And I felt much better when I decided to stop.”Barratier had to struggle to find work in the film industry. “I had to fight to get on set, to be a director’s assistant, to be a production assistant,” he says.