The Concert (2009)

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

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.

I ordered this DVD version from Amazon not realizing that it was dubbed. Amazon has taken steps to update the site. The Distribution for North America is completely dubbed in English and not a good dub at that. I did order from the UK the Original Russian/French version with English subtitles, Amazon thought my DVD Player would handle it, but the DVD Player alerted me that my TV was too old to play PAL. I did get it to play on my computer, but that defeats the whole purpose.I saw the Original at SIFF, took my Brother and his wife to see it. We were all crying at the end. The Original is a 10, and I am also aware this is related to Orchestra from Japan. Still I rate the Original a 10, the English Dubbing a 6.

I really don't remember any movie that made my avoid blinking for such a long period of time.The summary describes all my feelings for this movie. Excellence at its best !--------Just to complete the minimum of 10 lines of text I will try to give some more information about the movie.Acting was surprisingly good even though at the beginning that's not very clear. The quality of the shots is OK, not over the usual movie shots but under no circumstances bad. Music is surreal, you really fell like you are in the theater.

After a surfeit of mediocre American movies lately, I was mesmerised by the magical film of The Concert. Rarely seeing Russian movies, I was intrigued by the setting, characters, snapshots of Russian life today, and swept away by the way in which the actors and director lifted the ordinary into the extraordinary by way of a great plot, exquisite comedy moments, and a romantic theme which had nothing sentimental about it. The central character, Filipov, has an impossible dream and the realisation of this dream through a series of improbable connections results in a screwball comedy the likes of which we haven't seen since Billy Wilder's 'Some Like It Hot'. The musical background provides a culturally sophisticated backdrop to an earthy and simple concept: the combination of the two creates a little masterpiece of a film.From the sub-plots of Russians in Paris trying to make a buck, to the sensitive history of the celebrity violinist persuaded to play the Tchaikowsky concerto with the makeshift, unrehearsed, pseudo-Bolshoi orchestra, the film manages to capture every last nuance of human sensibility. The depiction of the tragi-comedic figure of the arch Communist Gavrilov who ruined the original concert and the lives of orchestra musicians 30 years previously, and now is responsible for ensuring the orchestra reconvene and play in Paris a master stroke and lends the lie to the whole plot.My only criticism is the way in which the final sublime denouement is cut across with collages of resolving the mystery between Filipov, the conductor, and Anne-Marie, the violinist. I can see the point of combining the performance of the music with the resolution - it is clever and creates a crescendo of poignancy to the highest pitch of the music itself. But it was a little confusing and, though, of course, the whole film is a contrivance to entertain, too contrived in the sudden success of this abandoned and defunct orchestra of Jewish misfits in Russia.This film is a compelling story, beautifully played, and a lovely idea. To create a hilariously funny yet subtly and searingly poignant plot is remarkable and I cannot imagine any film lover not enjoying this lovely film.