The Concert (2010)

Did you people see the same film I saw?

A lot of fun.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

If farce mixed with slapstick and a heavy dose of sentimentality is your thing, than check out The Concert by Romanian born French director Radu Mihaileanu. The premise is so absurd that only those with the most meager of critical faculties will enjoy it.The protagonist is Andrei Filipov (Alexei Guskov), who was the world famous Bolshoi conductor who lost his job by supporting his mostly Jewish orchestra members after they were all forced out during a purge instituted by Soviet premier Brezhnev in 1980.Flash forward to the present and Andrei now can only dream of his glory days while toiling as a janitor at the Bolshoi; he ends up intercepting a fax sent by Paris' Theatre du Chatelet begging the Bolshoi management to bring the orchestra to Paris as a fill-in for the last minute- cancellation of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.Well yes it's supposed to be a farce but even the most exaggerated of conceits must operate within some kind of credible context. Here, the context is too absurd to be taken seriously. You can probably guess what Andrei's next move is—gather together his former band of musicians (now a motley crew of low-lifes, scrounging for their next day's ruble) and arrange for all of them to fly to Paris, and pawn themselves off as the real Bolshoi musicians.Andrei, along with his buddy, the portly and amiable Sacha (Dmitry Nazarov), end up relying on the former Bolshoi manager, Ivan (Valeri Barinov), a former KGB apparatchik, who speaks French and negotiates with the head of the Theare du Chatelet, to bring Andrei's long out of the limelight misfits to Paris. The joke of Ivan, attempting to revive a Communist Congress in Paris, grows tiresome early on. The conscripted musicians all turn out to be stereotypes of one kind or another—from their money grubbing demands for pay immediately and their desire to party (instead of rehearsing), up until minutes before the concert is supposed to begin.Meanwhile Andrei has decided to perform Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, performed by the young French violinist Anne-Marie Jacquet (Melanie Laurent), who has never played this Tchaikovsky piece before. Since the farce and slapstick fail to evoke many laughs, director Mihaileanu suddenly shifts gears and attempts to evoke the tears. It turns out that Anne-Marie is the daughter of two of the Bolshoi musicians who were sent to a gulag in Siberia and Andrei uses the promise of disclosure of this information, to entice Jacquet back to play at the concert, after she insists she won't play under any circumstances.The absurdity of the script reaches its apotheosis when the orchestra begins playing without rehearsal and predictably plays completely out of tune. But the great Jacquet plays so beautifully that Andrei's motley crew rises to the occasion and wows the audience to the point that they're hired for additional engagements across the continent, for the upcoming year.While most of the actors do their best with such thin material, in the end the project cannot be saved. Sentimental, with few laughs, The Concert gives the classical music world a bad name along with its cinematic counterpart.

The themes are familiar, the characters are interesting but not complex, the script is uncomplicated, the humour comfortable – the story itself is straightforward, but the sum of these largely unremarkable parts is a truly uplifting piece of cinema. It is a great pleasure to discover that a film like The Concert can still exist in a cinematic landscape over-shadowed by violence, sexual objectification, product placement and the commercial imperative. Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds, Now You Seen Me) is probably the best known face in a largely eastern European cast, but it is Aleksey Guskov who steals the show as the Maestro with an endearing performance. Thank goodness (and thank Rumania director Radu Mihaileanu) for cinema with a good heart and a positive message, and characters motivated by kindness and artistic vision. The finale is a heart-warming emotional crescendo. It is genuinely satisfying to see a happy outcome, and well worth the modest investment of time to experience entertainment that is life-affirming, which, sadly, cannot be said about the majority of cinema these days.

when I read the plot summary I thought oh this looks good Brezhnev persecuting the supremely talented Jewish musicians AND punishing the supremely talented MAESTRO who throws away his career to support the persecutees. and for helping them he ends up a cleaner. such a dramatic story full of heartache and desire.then I find that it is all made up and not very well made up. the makers can't decide if it is a story about persecution and overcoming the odds OR is it some kind of a comedy with the big guy with the beard. quite disappointing really (and I don't like Tchaikovsky).By the way I don't know who tramky is but he or she is obviously a jackass.

First of all, I'm very familiar with classical music because it's played all the time at home, so I guess I wasn't impressed or felt emotional at all by Tchaikovsky's music, like other reviewers were, since I've listened and watched the whole Violin Concerto many times before. Because of that, I was expecting some more from this movie besides the music, something that entertained me, or at least interested me. The top reviewer of this movie said it was worthy of paying a ticket just for the opening credits. THE OPENING CREDITS. Bravo. The problem is after that comes a 2-hours long (an editor, somewhere?) colossal bore about some orchestra conductor who was fired for defending Jewish musicians (same Jewish that are later completely ridiculized with the same old boring clichés I'm very sick of), and now works as a janitor in the same theatre where he used to conduct. Right, unbelievable. Any normal person would never come back to work at the place where he was humiliated that way, and much less to clean the floor. Dignity, anyone? Then he cheats the Bolshoi and reunite his old orchestra (they haven't played in 30 years) to cheat on the French making them believe they're the famous Bolshoi Theather Orchestra instead of a group of gypsies, and perform a concert in Paris. Everyone says this is a very funny movie. Well, I didn't laugh once, for the simple reason I'm not a racist, and that I've seen this dusty clichés in at least another 350 movies. Nobody in Paris notices they're not the Bolshoi Orchestra, even when they doesn't act or look like professional musicians, they go get drunk and play in the subway instead of rehearsing, in fact they didn't rehearse at all, AND A FAMOUS Paris THEATRE LETS THEM PLAY ANYWAY WITHOUT EVEN CHECKING WHO THEY ARE! Haha yeah I know, I should suspend my disbelief because it's a farce. Sure, and it's a very cheap one too. You suspend it, I didn't. They play awfully the first notes of the Concerto, and then, when the blonde violinist I was supposed to cry for when I couldn't care less about starts to play, the magically got it right and play it beautifully. Terrific. But of course, I'm just insensitive. You can go and laugh and cry and stay at the edge of your seat for 2 beautiful hours. Cry when the director tells you to cry, even when there's nothing to cry for, and believe that all those implausible situations might be real hilarious facts. Thank God I'm not another puppet. Goodbye.