At the Movies: The Concert
“Ah, film reviewing,” you say. “I can do that.”
Maybe you can, but it’s a deceptive business. Some films seem to have a mind of their own. Even if you’re tired or distracted, some can manipulate you into channelling screeds of florid, impassioned prose about something that was a bit tawdry and forgettable. Some awful films con you into grubbing for actual compliments. And some excellent films can leave you staring blankly at your laptop while they silently refuse to give up their qualities to print, with no care for a deadline.
The Concert is one of the latter. It’s such an unusual film it defies a conventional review, so I’m going to have to sneak round the back while it’s not looking and catch it by surprise.
Last night, I watched a subtitled farce made by a Jewish Romanian director living in France about a Russian orchestra. Actually, it wasn’t entirely a farce. Actually, it wasn’t entirely an orchestra. . . it used to be the Bolshoi orchestra before the conductor was fired for refusing to expel Jewish musicians.
The ex-conductor, prodigy Andrei Filipov (Aleksei Guskov), since demoted to a cleaning position for the current Bolshoi orchestra and bullied by its director, intercepts an invitation for the Bolshoi to play in Paris. With the collusion of his wonderful friend and cellist Sacha, and an old enemy, Gavrilov, he secretly reconvenes the old orchestra, now a colourful assortment of taxi drivers, stallkeepers and gypsies. After demanding the French secure them a certain violin soloist and a free cruise on the Seine, they manage, through a series of misadventures, to get to Paris.
That’s the superficial version (or some of it), and it might have made a fine French farce played simply like that. But this film has SO much more: politics, dreams, egos, crime, money; race and class struggles, intercultural exchange, secrets and lies, liberation, the unifying power of music and an unexpectedly stirring subplot. It transcends farce and exposes itself as a complex and clever drama that will be remembered as having one of the strongest and satisfying endings in recent film.
You will need patience. Understanding crescendo, the director has you waiting through a long adagio prelude before the film comes together—and it does, with life and humour and Tchaikovsky’s exquisite Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.
When you understand that the Romanian director Radu Mihaileanu arrived in France at 22 having fled the regime of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, and his father was a communist journalist who changed his name from Buchman in order to survive first the Nazis and then Stalin, you get a better sense of the perspectives he brings to this and his other acclaimed films.
He says The Concert is based on real incidents. The marvel is the degree to which he applies humour to so much social commentary and how well he makes it work.
“My favourite kind of humour is a response to suffering and difficulty,” he says in the production notes. “For me, humour is a joyous and intelligent weapon—a gymnastics of the spirit—against barbarism and death. . . Effectively, in the film, the humour comes from a wound that was inflicted on Russia 30 years ago, in Brezhnev’s USSR. People were humiliated and cast down. Their will to get up again and regain their dignity has to pass through humour.”
I’ve apparently defeated The Concert’s reluctance to be reviewed. Just as well: this is one unusual and multilayered piece of film-making, and it deserves a look.
Maria Polglase
The Concert (M). The next screening at The Village Theatre will be held on Sunday 26 September at 4.30pm.
