Emmanuel Courcol, “En Fanfare!” (English title: “My Brother’s Band”) (2024)
Initially the advertising for “En Fanfare!” suggested this was going to be fairly straightforward light-hearted fare – but to my pleasant surprise the film is much more layered, addressing not only the whims of fate that separate two brothers with musical talent but also (if slightly perhaps) issues of social class and the effects of deindustrialisation on communities, and how communities might react and rally together to meet challenges hostile to their interests. Internationally renowned orchestra conductor Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) may travel across the world to conduct symphonies and concertos, but his own personal world comes crashing down when he learns he has terminal leukaemia and only bone marrow transplanted from a sibling offers hope of a cure. His sister offers her bone marrow but it is not a match – and more surprisingly, the doctors doing their DNA testing discover that Thibaut and his sister are not related. This leads to an even more shocking revelation: Thibaut had been adopted nearly 40 years ago and had never been told of his adoption. The conductor then searches for his biological family – this part happens off-screen – and finds he has a younger brother, Jimmy (Pierre Lottin), who works in a school cafeteria and cares for his mother in a working-class district in Lille. In his spare time, Lottin plays trombone in a community brass band attached to a factory that has just been closed down. Astonished and shocked at the hand Fate has dealt his brother compared to the charmed life he has been lucky to have, Thibaut decides to help Jimmy and encourage him to develop his musical talents, especially after the brass band loses its conductor.
There follows a series of sketches woven into a narrative of self-discovery and transformation, as both Jimmy and Thibaut learn more about their origins and find an old 1980s-era photograph of their mother as a young girl at a high school in Lille, and as Jimmy learns the hard way how to balance ambition, nurture and develop his musical talent and skill, and his family and community obligations. At the same time, Jimmy’s community is hit by one misfortune after another: the community brass band is forced to disband after a punch-up at an annual brass band competition, the band’s musical instruments are taken away by the local mayor’s people and community members are locked out of the disused factory. Jimmy loses his job in the school cafeteria for feeding factory workers on strike. Thibaut’s treatment (using bone marrow donated by Jimmy) fails to work and Thibaut is no longer able to carry out projects he had planned to do, including a project to raise public awareness of the closure of the factory in Jimmy’s district and the effect this will have on the community.
Viewers may be confused at how much is packed into this briskly paced film – both Jimmy and Thibaut have to cope and deal with several things all at once, and all of them potentially life-changing – but it is to the credit of the director and the cast, and Lavernhe and Lottin as Thibaut and Jimmy respectively, that the film works as smoothly as it does, highlighting what Thibaut and Jimmy have in common that helps them to bond and to help each other in spite of their very different social backgrounds. The result is that we see the two men change and mature, and gain understanding of one another’s way of life – and in doing so, appreciate what they already have in their own lives. Thibaut, Jimmy and the people in Jimmy’s community whom Thibaut comes to know and respect may not be able to overcome the insidious damage being done by government authorities, represented by a corrupt mayor, to the district and its people in closing down the factory and throwing so many – factory workers, miners, and those depending on the workers to buy their products and use their services – out of work; but in their own way, they learn to come together and support one another, and discover that communal action can actually achieve public sympathy and break down social and cultural barriers.
An unexpected joy in this film is the use of music – in particular the use of jazz and classical music – to demonstrate that different genres of music usually associated with different social classes and their sub-cultures in fact have much in common and have even borrowed from each other and been influenced by ambient background noises and machine rhythms associated with factory work. This realisation helps to bring Jimmy and Thibaut closer together and eventually through music and sharing hardships the two men become true soul brothers. Both Lavernhe and Lottin do great work as the brothers separated by whimsical Fate and social class who overcome the barriers of culture and temporal distance, and they are ably supported by actors playing very eccentric characters.
The only downer perhaps is the film’s cliffhanger ending, leaving many plot threads open and unresolved. We do not know how much time Thibaut has left, and what impact his passing may have on Jimmy and others whose lives Thibaut has touched in this working-class community – but we do know that whatever happens, the people will be standing together to weather whatever Fate throws at them next.