Le Concert (2009) - film review

At the time of Brezhnev, Andrei Filipov was the most celebrated conductor in the USSR.  But when he refused to part company with his Jewish musicians, he was dismissed without ceremony.  Thirty years on, Andrei is once again employed by the Bolshoi Orchestra, but as a cleaner.  One evening, whilst busily engaged in his chores, he comes across a fax addressed to his employer.  It is an invitation to the orchestra to perform at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris.  Andrei suddenly has an idea.  Why not round up his old friends, all former musicians who are now employed in menial jobs, and pass themselves off as the Bolshoi Orchestra...?

In this, his fourth feature, director Radu Mihaileanu treads a fine line between the grotesque and the glorious, and visibly struggles to make comfortable bedfellows of its two main ingredients, boisterous farce and sentimental melodrama.   The sombre references to the old Soviet purges sit ill alongside the kind of gags you’d expect to find in an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  Le Concert is an unwieldy mishmash that somehow manages to redeem itself in its last twenty minutes or so, although a certain Pyotr Tchaikovsky should take the lion’s share of the credit for this.

Those who are familiar with Mihaileanu’s work will notice some plot similarities with his previous films, Train de vie (1998) and Va, vis et deviens (2005).  In each of these three films, the protagonists resort to impersonation as a means of salvation.   Train de vie involves a party of Jews who try to escape the Nazis by faking their own deportation.  In Va, vis et deviens, an Ethiopian mother passes her son off as a Jew so that he can be airlifted to safety during an evacuation.  In Le Concert, a group of blacklisted Russian musicians pretend to be the Bolshoi Orchestra.  When this recurring theme was pointed out to Mihaileanu, he revealed that his father had had to assume a false identity during the war to evade capture by the Nazis.   A Romanian who has lived in France for the past thirty years, Mihaileanu admitted that he also felt that he has acquired a dual identity.

Mihaileanu’s penchant for heavily ladled sentimentality can be noticed in his earlier films, but in Le Concert the emotional heart-tugging is carried to almost operatic proportions.  The director gets away with this by counterpointing the treacly sentimentality with some wacky humour, this sweet-and-sour combination somehow managing to work genuine feeling into the film.   The concert hall finale is particularly effective and is so overpowering that it risks drowning the spectator in a tsunami of raw emotion.

The film is not without charm and grandeur but it also has some inescapable flaws.  For one thing it is overlong and is handicapped with a needlessly muddled middle section which could easily have been excised since it adds nothing whatever to the substance of the film.  The characters are generally well-played, even if a few veer too closely to caricature.  Aleksei Guskov’s one-note portrayal of the leading protagonist is made bearable only by the livelier contributions from his co-stars, notably Mélanie Laurent, who really does look as though she might be a world-class violinst.

Le Concert may not be what we might have expected from a director of Radu Mihaileanu’s ability but it has an indefinable appeal and is, overall, an enjoyable romp.  If only Mihaileanu had been able to sustain the lyracism and emotional intensity that are felt in the film’s final movement throughout the entire two hour runtime, then it might very well have been a masterpiece.  As its is, Le Concert is an uncomfortably disjointed film which is only partially satisfying.  To its credit though, it is a superb promotion piece for classical music, and that can surely be no bad thing.

© James Travers 2010

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Les personnages sont fort bien campés, le film tient la route. J’ai trouvé le montage excellent. L’histoire est peut-être moins bonne dans ses parties mélodramatiques. Elle devient tellement invraisemblable, avec une  hésitation quant à qui est le père de cette violoniste, et une disparition exagerée de Guylène, comme s’il fallait perdre une mère pour trouver un père, qui finalement se désiste. Trop patologique pour cette petite histoire sur une grande page d’histoire et une autre grande page de musique. Le concert lui-meme est magnifique, et je crois que les musiciens qui jouent méritent un plus grand mention aux géneriques.
Diane Berkowitz (Israel)

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