Marching Band (2024)

I did not watch a lot of great movies on my long haul trips so far this year, but this is the winner. French film-maker Emmanuel Courcol has a nice touch with this dramedy. Benjamin Lavernhe plays Thibaut, a distinguished and sensitive orchestra conductor who collapses mid-rehearsal in Paris and is told he has leukaemia and needs a bone marrow transplant donor. Thibaut is adopted and this means tracking down his biological brother out in the boondocks: factory worker Jimmy, played by the formidable Pierre Lottin, whose gift for deadpan comedy really only gets free rein at the very beginning of the film. Thibaut has the tricky task of asking someone who is a total stranger if he wouldn’t mind donating his bone marrow. But this fraught situation reveals – a little programmatically, perhaps – that Jimmy has a real musical talent, like him, plays trombone in the raucous factory band and nurses a passion for jazz on vinyl. Thibault sees in Jimmy a vision of what his own life could have been without his adoptive mother’s comfortable middle-class background, and sees Jimmy and himself through the lens of class, politics and society, and not the supposed destiny of pure talent. It is a great story well told, and it has the subtext of what the affirmative action of class provledge affords those who are born into it.