Cinema Paradiso (1988) and Les Choristes (The Chorus, 2004) didn't seem like they would have a lot in common. After all, they were made 16 years apart, Cinema is Italian, Choristes is French, Cinema is mostly about a young man growing up and his love of movies, Choristes centers on a music teacher working as a prefect at a boys school. Watching these relatively close together highlighted an interesting commonality, however, and that was in the casting. What ties these together is that Jacques Perrin plays the guy who remembers...I didn't know anything about this French actor, and had he not appeared in two movies so close together (close together in our queue, I mean), I probably never would have looked him up. He has had a long and successful career not only as an actor but also a producer and a director. Among other things -- and the only other thing I'd seen -- he was the writer/producer/director of Winged Migration (2001).
Perrin's characters in both Cinema and Choristes went from inauspicious beginnings to become very successful. In Cinema, as an actor, and in Choristes as a singer, musician, and eventually a conductor. Both characters were mentored by a man with a powerful personality and who served as a stand-in of a sort for an absent father. He has minimal screen time (particularly in Choristes), but his character functions as the narrative frame for the story from his youth. (And even in 2004, Perrin looks pretty darned good.)
And I'll just tip you off about another strong common quality of these: both are tear-jerkers -- Choristes shamelessly so. (I must have gone through half of a box of kleenex on that one. Half? Maybe a whole box!) They're dramatic, yet terribly, terribly sweet. I consider these both to have been a good use of a couple of hours.
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