Fridae

Brought down and publicly humiliated at the height of his career by Leonid Brezhnev for daring to oppose the party leader’s anti-Semitic policies, former Bolshoi maestro Andrei Filipov and his deposed orchestra languish as underemployed janitors, drivers, museum guards. Sure, the Soviet Union may have fallen, the party bosses and apparatchiks replaced by mob bosses and oligarchs, but nothing’s changed for them – that is, until Filipov steals the Bolshoi’s engagement in Paris.

What follows is a broad comedy ranging from the impossibilities of reuniting ageing and washed-up has-beens to re-form the orchestra, the delicacies of negotiating for funding from oligarchs, tricking the haughty French into accepting the rag-tag group as the real deal, misadventures in Paris, and with a rousing performance of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto thrown in.

You’d be forgiven if you mistake this for any of the Japanese productions that we’ve been getting in the past few years. The premise certainly sounds like a run of the mill Japanese dramedy, but the execution couldn’t be more different. Instead of an everything but the kitchen sink drama, Le Concert is an everything but the kitchen sink comedy that manages to feel light-hearted (in a sometimes tragicomic Russian way) and well-paced despite its almost Japanese length screen time.

While taking apart post-soviet Russian society and embellishing national and ethnic stereotypes for harmless laughs, the Romanian director’s screenplay has deeper undercurrents running through it. Aside from delivering the jokes, the screenplay meditates on the relationship that threads between genius and obsession, loss and longing, and the true meaning of teamwork and solidarity.

The film has an excellent soundtrack and score as the icing on top of a perfect confection. Le Concert is a film that is after the heart of music lovers out there.