BY DAVID TAO
Daily TV/New Media Editor
Published October 3, 2010
A French film about classical music combines arguably the two most highbrow forms of entertainment still in existence. Yet “The Concert” is surprisingly conventional and crass. Despite a veneer of sophistication, director Radu Mihaileanu’s (“Train of Life”) attempt at dramedy is nothing more than a predictable, done-before underdog story, full of lazy character development and tone-deaf execution.
"The Concert"
At the Michigan
The Weinstein Company
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Our underdog is Andrei Filipov (Aleksei Guskov, “Ragin”), a washed-up former conductor of Russia’s premier orchestra, the Bolshoi. After resisting the Communist Party’s order to fire all Jewish musicians, he was sacked alongside those he tried to defend. He has spent the decades since his termination as a janitor, cleaning the orchestra’s building and longing for the past. When he stumbles upon an invitation for the Bolshoi to perform at Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, he sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. By bringing his old orchestra back together and posing as the Bolshoi, Filipov hopes to regain his credibility and put his life back on track.
With the help of best friend Sasha (Dmitri Nazarov, “Prince Vladimir”) and Gavrilov (Valeriy Barinov, “The Best Movie”), an ex-manager of the Bolshoi, Filipov reunites his old orchestra and makes arrangements for the titular concert. As Gavrilov negotiates with the Parisian theater, the comedy stems mainly from his botched French, milked endlessly and ineffectively. We meet the orchestra and suddenly the jokes turn from lame to offensive, as we’re introduced to a sea of ethnic and religious stereotypes – Russian alcoholics, Gypsy thieves and money-grubbing Jews.
The movie seesaws between these pathetic attempts at humor and other similarly unappealing attempts at drama and intrigue. Filipov has just two weeks to assemble a program, but he insists upon playing Tchaikovsky’s impossibly difficult Violin Concerto, and demands the world-famous Anne Marie-Jacquet (Melanie Laurent, “Inglourious Basterds”) as the soloist. The reasons behind these particular preferences are rather unclear. Apparently, they have something to do with Filipov’s last performance, during which his violin concerto was ended prematurely by government decree. Blurry footage from that fateful event is repeated again and again to tug on our heartstrings. The movie also mentions some kind of mysterious relationship that Filipov has with Marie-Jacquet’s checkered past — it’s all very vague and almost impossible to understand.
Nonetheless, Filipov is the film’s hero, so he gets what he wants regardless of his motives or their real-world achievability. Mihaileanu’s impatient direction either smashes down or glazes over the barriers that stand in his protagonist’s way. Nothing really seems to matter in the grand scheme of the film, not his orchestra’s unwillingness to rehearse, not their violent drunkenness and certainly not the fact that Marie-Jacquet has never played Tchaikovsky. Characters tell Filipov that his concert is “bound to fail,” but the words are hollow and unconvincing — never has it been so obvious that a director is rooting for his protagonist.
That the film almost manages to work around this gaping flaw is a testament to Guskov’s charisma. He plays Filipov with a hard-faced look of perpetual determination that cuts through the tastelessly scripted antics. Throughout the film, his character seems oblivious to his unnaturally good luck, sporting a genuinely worried expression that allows the audience to suspend their disbelief long enough to enjoy the film. In the end, the film’s climatic musical finale is made all the more powerful by his presence as its anchoring force, even if the route the film took to get there is confusingly unrealistic.
