My Brother’s Band (2024)

Also known as: The Marching Band
Original title: En fanfare

Emmanuel Courcol’s third feature starts with what sounds like the setup for something mawkish: two brothers, split by adoption, thrown back together because one needs the other’s bone marrow. You can almost see the manipulative strings before they’re even pulled. Except Courcol doesn’t pull them. My Brother’s Band takes that premise and does something considerably more interesting with it, building a story about class, circumstance, and whether talent means anything without opportunity.

Thibaut is an orchestral conductor of international standing. Concert halls, airport lounges, the whole cosmopolitan package. Then he collapses mid-performance, gets diagnosed with leukaemia, and discovers during the donor search that he was adopted. This leads him to Jimmy, his biological younger brother, who works in a school canteen in northern France and plays trombone in the local marching band. Different worlds doesn’t quite cover it. When Thibaut recognises that Jimmy has genuine musical ability (the kind that, in another life, might have led somewhere), he decides to do something about it. Jimmy, understandably wary of this Parisian arriving to fix his life, isn’t immediately convinced.

What Courcol has done here, working with co-writers Irène Muscari, Oriane Bonduel, and Marianne Tomersy, is craft a film about social determinism without ever lecturing about it. The film doesn’t need to explain that Thibaut’s trajectory and Jimmy’s weren’t accidents. You can see it in every choice, every contrast between their environments. One brother got classical training and a career trajectory; the other got a factory town facing closure and a passion he pursues in his spare time. The film doesn’t romanticise either position or pretend that discovering each other solves the fundamental unfairness of how their lives diverged.

Benjamin Lavernhe gives Thibaut layers that prevent him from becoming merely the successful brother slumming it. There’s real uncertainty beneath the professional polish, a man confronting mortality and realising he doesn’t know who he actually is. Pierre Lottin matches him scene for scene, giving Jimmy a quality that’s hard to define but essential: he’s not noble suffering personified, just a decent person trying to figure out whether this sudden brother represents genuine connection or another disappointment. Their dynamic builds slowly, two people testing whether biology matters when you’ve shared nothing else.

The music acts as more than backdrop or metaphor. Whether it’s Thibaut conducting an orchestra or Jimmy playing with his band, Courcol treats both traditions with equal seriousness. The soundtrack moves between classical compositions and Charles Aznavour’s “Emmenez-moi,” never suggesting one form is inherently superior. It’s a small choice that carries significant weight: excellence and passion exist everywhere, even if the rewards don’t follow the same distribution pattern.

The cinematography finds something worth looking at in northern France without prettifying the economic reality. Early shots establish distance and formality; later ones feel more intimate. It mirrors the brothers’ relationship without overstating the point.

The film does lose momentum in the middle. Some sections linger too long on the mechanics of the brothers learning to trust each other, and certain supporting characters around the marching band feel half-developed. There’s a factory closure subplot that seems thematically important but doesn’t quite land with the impact Courcol appears to want. These aren’t fatal flaws, but they’re noticeable.

Still, My Brother’s Band premiered at Cannes 2024, became a substantial hit in France (over $20 million at the box office), and picked up seven César nominations. That success feels deserved. This is a film that respects its audience enough to leave things unsaid, that believes art can transform lives without pretending transformation is simple or complete. Courcol has made something that feels genuinely humane: a story about second chances that acknowledges most people don’t get them, and about fraternal bonds built not through shared history but through the considerably harder work of choosing connection across profound difference.