Le concert

I liked Le Train De La Vie, but i loved Le Concert. Mihaileanu keeps things simple and withholds just a couple of info, in order to reveal the actual truth at the end of the movie. He creates a drama without forcing you into tears from the beginning, consolidating every dramatic moment with a gag, joke or just a funny face. He builds funny characters, that you can enjoy seeing without being worn off by their problems or issues.

He was able to make a 2 hours film that envelopes so much about drama, failure, communism, music and dedication that is quite impossible not to appreciate. This movie was quite a joy.

If you love music this will quickly become a favorite for you.

This movie is all about music. An orchestra conductor is given a second chance 30 years later and he definitely grabs it.

Life flows through this movie. You can detect how music mixes with life and how music is a part and at the same time is not a part of life.

Music lifts you beyond life.

I also liked the comedy parts. Life is tragedy and comedy and music encompasses it all.

Be advised that the director likes to play and the mixture between fantasy and real life is present throughout the whole movie.

Also, please note the gypsy who arranges the passport issue. In real life he is a member of the Romanian music band Taraf des Haidouks (http://www.myspace.com/tarafdehaidouksbandofgypsies). They have amazing music and you will also be treated with a small sample in the movie. He is one of my favorite characters in the movie and one of my favorite performers on stage.

I'm trying to find any downsides to this movie but I personally can't. The person who accompanied me to the cinema said it was too...soapy. I was just sorry I was not alone in my home...This is a movie where you meet yourself so you'd better not have witnesses.

The Concert is a French/ Italian/Romanian/Belgian production shot in Moscow and Paris. The publicity blurb says that the musical finale is worth the ticket price alone, but I would say even reading the list of exotic names floating over the opening credits is worth a good percentage of the price.

We travel back 30 years to when Andrei, talented young conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra, was humiliated and sacked by Breshnev for refusing to get rid of his Jewish musicians. Fast forward to the present, and we find him still working at the Bolshoi - but as a cleaner. One lucky day he finds himself alone with the office fax machine. What follows is an audacious plot to get his old sidekicks to Paris, using borrowed instruments, hired suits and fake passports, posing as the real Bolshoi for a concert at the Theatre du Chatelet. If you can imagine a story as full of colour and drama as the TV rock 'n' roll serial epic Tutti Frutti, jammed into just one cinema experience, this could be it. It's rare to see so many set pieces in one film.

I laughed out loud once or twice - and if you know what a grumpy old man I am you would realise what that means. I was also moved to tears, but I'm not telling you why. That would spoil it all - just saying that under its layer of manic fast-cut comedy the story carries a deep, dark and passionate secret which gradually reveals itself as the comedy peels off. The music is, I have to add, beautiful - whether it's Roma dance jigs in the street or Tchaikovsky in the concert hall. Bring a hanky!

This movie goes a long way to heal my nostalgia for the good films of old. A lot of the "modern" eastern European movies try very hard to be so soul searching, so psycho-dramatic, as if they are on a mission to turn and twist their bewildered audience in the hope of some intellectual and metaphysical gratification (or maybe just the hope of a Palme D'Or). Radu Mihaileanu is the master of story telling, touching souls in the best way possible, really. Yes you can pick faults, like with most movies, but if you really pay attention and let you and your feelings move with the flow of the movie, you will be in for a great soul experience. The inaccuracies, the factual errors won't matter anymore. What it does matter is that the author is pretty much exact in retrieving the atmosphere of an era which some of us actually experienced.

This is the first film of Radu Mihaileanu that really did it to me. It is moving, I resonated with the subject, I laughed when it was funny and I was close to tears when it meant to be emotional. Yet, as his previous films, it is not a masterpiece just a good film to remember. Which is no small matter either.

Mihaileanu's previous films were each of them based on original and different ideas. in each of those the ideas hold above the execution. 'Train de vie' was one of the first films to deal with Holocaust from a comic perspective, and maybe the most interesting idea of all, better even as Begnini's maybe. 'Les pygmees de Carlo' dealt with the communication between cultures in an unusual way. 'Vas, viens, et deviens' is the only movie until now to deal with the Ethiopian immigration to Israel. Here, in 'Le Concert' two main ideas dominate the action. One is about the new culture of vulgarity and mediocrity that dominates the life after the fall of the Communism. The main hero (wonderfully acted by Aleksei Gluskov) is a great conductor. His life and career were broken during the Communist rule for having opposed the regime of Brezhnev. Yet, the change of the social order did not put him back in place, as the collaborators of the old regime and the new oligarchs took the place of the rulers, siding the real values. The second idea is that music redeems, transcends politics, and is worth any risks and sacrifices.

'Le Concert' is correspondingly divided into two parts. The first one is a brilliant comedy, one of the best that I have seen lately. It is based on stereotypes one may argue, the stereotype of the Russians and French, of the Jews and Gypsies, of musicians and impresarios, Communists and oligarchs, but in these case they work, and the result is true and funny. The Russian orchestra of former musicians, sided away by the new times makes it to Paris under the label of the Bolshoi to give the concert of their lives, the proof that Tchaikovsky, and Russian music, and value are still there despite all. Then the second part begins, the one in which all becomes personal, Then the second part begins, the one in which all becomes personal, with a seemingly love story which turns to be something completely different, a much more dramatic story in which music is not only revenge but also personal redemption, is not only survival but also coming from beyond the graves of a tragic history.

This is were the strength and the weakness of Radu Mihaileanu's art meet. All the film converges to the final scene, the one of the concert in Paris, we know it from the beginning. All the explanation will be present in that scene, and this is the bet and the risk of any music film in the history of cinema. The result is only a partial win. Tchaikovsky's Concerto for Violin provides the appropriate background, and the emotional result is immediate. The doubts start after the screening ends. The situation is certainly less than credible, from an intrigue and musical point of view. Mihaileanu's execution is too direct, he plays too much on short term emotions, tears are too apparent. He has huge ideas, and one day he may turn them into one or more great movies. 'Le Concert' is too explicit, it lacks the patience and the sophistication to be that one .