Beautiful, moving film.

Absolutely Brilliant!

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

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.

Classified in France as a Drama this film is full of laughs tempered with what is apparently based on a true and harrowing story. Others have already written about the plot so just enough here to say what a great film this is. Especially amusing was the issuing of their forged passports in the airport foyer under the noses of the guards. I loved the way that the various ex-orchestra members went their various ways with their enterprising money-making ventures, seizing the opportunity to make the most from their unexpected chance to go from impoverished Russia to Paris to make a fast buck. Especially impressive was the fact that Melanie Laurent spent a lot of time preparing for the role of violin virtuoso by studying under a professional violinist for several weeks beforehand - and it showed. Thoroughly recommended.

The themes are familiar, the characters are interesting but not complex, the script is uncomplicated, the humour comfortable – the story itself is straightforward, but the sum of these largely unremarkable parts is a truly uplifting piece of cinema. It is a great pleasure to discover that a film like The Concert can still exist in a cinematic landscape over-shadowed by violence, sexual objectification, product placement and the commercial imperative. Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds, Now You Seen Me) is probably the best known face in a largely eastern European cast, but it is Aleksey Guskov who steals the show as the Maestro with an endearing performance. Thank goodness (and thank Rumania director Radu Mihaileanu) for cinema with a good heart and a positive message, and characters motivated by kindness and artistic vision. The finale is a heart-warming emotional crescendo. It is genuinely satisfying to see a happy outcome, and well worth the modest investment of time to experience entertainment that is life-affirming, which, sadly, cannot be said about the majority of cinema these days.

This movie takes you through a journey where for more than half of the time you collect elements without knowing it, just enjoying a funny and very well directed story. Then, when the concert actually begins, everything collapses and, together with the violinist, you have a sublime as unexpected epiphany that deeply moves you, filling you with joy. Mélanie Laurent is perfect in the role and I believe she is actually a fundamental catalyst for the story and the emotion that it conveys. "The Concert" lifts the bar of what you should be expecting from a movie. It is also a perfect example of how Europeans can still use the cinema not just to entertain but to enrich the public.