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 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.