A comedy-drama about estranged brothers who bond through a shared love of music, The Marching Band (En Fanfare) is the product of a resurgent French film industry making appealing films capable of beating Hollywood at its own game: The Marching Band outperformed Wicked in France on the latter’s opening weekend. 

In 2024, for the first time in a decade, the most-watched film of the year in France was French-made (the comedy Un P’Tit Truc en Plus); French cinemagoers were more likely to have bought a ticket for a movie made in France than any other country, and home-grown movies accounted for almost half cinema tickets sold.

British reviewers have tended to compare The Marching Band with 1996 British comedy-drama Brassed Off. Writer-director Emmanuel Courcol admires the latter, and acknowledges that the north of France’s strong tradition of mining community bands does mean that to an extent the two inhabit a shared universe; but his film has a uniquely French sensibility.  

Though emphasising that he “doesn’t want to make films that are depressing – there are plenty of other directors doing that without me weighing in”, Courcol rejects the potentially dismissive label ‘feelgood’:  “it is possible to make a popular film that works on different levels and that you can read in different ways.”  

The brass band featured in the film is partly made up of non-actor members of a real-life band, the Municipal Miners’ Band of Lallaing, who attended the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival; performing, to audience acclaim, a Charles Aznavour song at the end of the screening.  

“A comedy so French it should be wearing a beret … an unexpectedly thoughtful, almost Rousseauesque examination of nature versus nurture.” The Times