THINK of a teacher who changed your life for the better. Christophe Barratier was carted off to private school by his mother after his parents separated and his days were lonely and desperate until the redemptive power of music saved him.

The promptings of his music teacher led Christophe to music college and onwards to a career as a classical guitarist.

In gratitude, for his debut feature film, he has written, directed and composed the music for a story not dissimilar to his own. His redemption came in the Sixties and early Seventies, but The Chorus is set in 1949, four years after the Second World War: harsher times and a harsher school regime.

In a storyline adapted from the 1945 French film A Cage Of Nightingales, the avuncular Clemet Matthieu (Grard Jugnot) is appointed the new supervisor at a rural boarding school for wayward young boys. The school, Spartan and grim, is ruled in a regime of fear by a hateful headmaster (Francois Berleand), who has no feeling for the troublemakers and misfits sent his way, nor any love for the role of education.

With his bald head, diminutive build and bumbling manner, Matthieu looks easy meat to the errant boys, and yet gradually the pranks die out through his gift for understanding them. A failed composer, Matthieu picks up his pen once more and starts writing music by dormitory candle light for the boys to sing in the choir he has formed as a way of bonding them and lifting their spirits.

He is drawn to his most rebellious pupil (Jean-Baptiste Maunier, the character closest to Barratier), partly because the boy has the most beautiful singing voice, and partly because he has hopes of forming a liaison with the boy's mother, who makes his heart sing.

There are rocky moments ahead, and Barratier balances sentiment with a little steel too, while thrilling in the inspirational and spiritual power of choral music. Jugnot, more often seen on French television, has wonderful warmth and humour, Berleand's discipline-obsessed ogre is splendidly sadistic and the children have a natural manner that the inevitable Hollywood re-make is sure to lose.

Updated: 15:52 Thursday, March 10, 2005