Radu Mihaileanu
Il Concerto

It wasn't supposed to end like this. That time, when you unexpectedly found yourself on the ground. With your face in the mud of a humiliation beyond comparison. You remember it well, don't you? You can still smell it: don't be an ass by trying to deny it. It's pointless to shrug your shoulders; minimizing and pretending you're tougher and stronger than you really are. You're pathetic. It left a mark on you. Indelible. The years may have passed, I won't deny it, and like many layers of earth, they may have hidden and well sedimented that day in a corner of your mind. But just a breath, an innocent breath in the right spot and, voilà, the desire to have the chance to set it all right will come back strong. You'd build the flux capacitor with string and imagination to go back in time. It's called redemption, and this is what Radu Mihaileanu wants to talk about in his new work "The Concert".

A bittersweet comedy that speaks of friendship and lies for a good cause. A well-crafted and heterogeneous film: with deliberately exaggerated and fairy-tale-like outlines, but also with strokes of shrewd satire and melancholy in its depiction of characters divided between noble France and the fallen Mother Russia.
It was the pinnacle of his career, with the theater packed in every order of seats. Tchaikovsky's violin concerto for what he himself calls, moving his hand imagining holding the baton once more, the noble quest for the "absolute melody". It was supposed to be a day of triumph, but instead, the concert was meanly interrupted: his career irreparably broken.
Thirty years later, he is now a dry leaf, slowly withering away in the anonymous daily hustle of a Russia where rallies are filled with paid militants. Unexpectedly, from the paper tongue of a modern fax comes a faint possibility of revenge. A temptation which he grabs greedily, without even trying to quell it with objective, cold, rational analysis. It's up to him now to shoulder open that faint gap and enlarge it: to make it reality by orchestrating a gigantic benevolent scam to reclaim, with interest, what was unjustly taken.

We laugh heartily for a large part of the film. With a fast pace, well underscored by ethnic and folkloric music, his orchestra of the time is rebuilt piece by piece. A mighty Brancaleone army set to conquer the 2,000 seats of the Parisian Chatelet theater. The search for the lost musicians becomes comical, who now have had to reinvent jobs and live in a utopian, nostalgic, and chaotic context where the old regime and post-Berlin Wall situation mingle repeatedly to give life to grotesque scenes with guaranteed appeal.
When this indomitable colorful and heterogeneous elephant, made of stereotypical Jewish merchants, street Roma, and old militants of the utopian party, is finally brought to delicate France, it repeatedly risks destroying every dream of redemption.

And it's right here that the film changes gear.

When it seems now doomed to get stuck in a narrow dead end, with no other escape routes open except for an exaggerated sterile happy ending, the unconditional passion for music emerges forcefully. The film plays with the great expressiveness of the precious Melanie Laurent and Aleksei Guskov. It slows down, and the hilarity that had characterized the awkward and struggling orchestra's description vanishes to make way for short but intense dramatic moments where past and present intertwine unexpectedly.
They are told with a wise bittersweet touch until the passionate final concert. Photographed with extreme diligence and emotion with over ten uninterrupted minutes between bows, restless fingers, and tears. Whether or not it is the longest scene dedicated to a concert in cinema history, it is a real pleasure to sink into the seat; with the sound from the speakers ready to delight us with the powerful and captivating melodies of Tchaikovsky until the end credits. Torn between two ratings, I lean towards the higher one, which perhaps isn't fully deserved. But that's okay. 

Ilfreddo