20-05-2025
The Marching Band review — a comedy so French it should be wearing a beret
The French have two speeds of comedy — incredibly fast, like the farces of Feydeau, or gentle and low-key, like The Marching Band. Emmanuel Courcol's amiable feelgood film tells the story of Thibaut Desormeaux (Benjamin Lavernhe), a renowned orchestra conductor who, after being diagnosed with leukaemia, discovers through a DNA test that he was adopted. In search of a bone marrow donor, he approaches his new-found brother, Jimmy Lecocq (Pierre Lottin), who works in a school canteen in a small northern town and plays trombone for a local marching band.
If this film were British or American it would have been worked up into a broad, Billy Elliot-like culture-clash comedy in which the highfalutin classical snob learns salt-of-the earth life lessons from his
