Le Plaisir de chanter (2008)

Le Plaisir de chanter is a French comedy thriller film first released in 2008, directed by Ilan Duran Cohen.  The film stars Marina Foïs, Lorànt Deutsch, Jeanne Balibar, Julien Baumgartner and Nathalie Richard.  It has also been released under the title: The Joy of Singing.  Our overall rating for this film is: mediocre.


Muriel and Philippe are two French secret agents who are charged with recovering a USB memory stick which was in possession of a uranium trafficker when he was killed.  The memory stick is currently in the hands of the trafficker’s widow, Constance, and to persuade her to part with it Muriel and Philippe decide to enlist in her choral music course.  What they don’t know is that other agents are equally determined to recover the memory stick...

There’s not much plaisir to be found in this chaotic mishmash of genres (appropriate for a director whose best known film to date is La Confusion des genres).  There is probably some merit in the idea behind this film, and there is certainly no shortage of talent on either side of the camera, but a film that is so lacking in coherence and which fails to take itself seriously is hard to engage with.  It is hard to know which is more off-putting, the complete muddle of a plot or Ilan Duran Cohen’s self-consciously arty mise-en-scène.  The only thing the film has going for it is its orginality, but originality without substance is hardly an achievement.

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