A pleasant dramatic caper that wears out its welcome, The Concert is the houseguest who sings a little too loudly and too long for his supper, tone deaf to the line between charm and imposition. As the film's fairy-tale story is stretched beyond its means, disbelief -- at first suspended with pleasure -- is restored in increments, and mild resentment sets in.
Andreï Filipov (Alekseï Guskov) is a janitor at the Bolshoi in Moscow who is banned from sitting in on orchestra rehearsals when his cell phone interrupts one. A former conductor whose career ended 30 years earlier when he refused to capitulate to the Communist establishment's anti-Semitic demands (i.e., fire all the Jews), Andreï ekes out a living in his former wheelhouse. After intercepting a fax sent to the Bolshoi director's office inviting the orchestra for a one-off at the Pleyel in Paris, the humbled maestro hatches a pretty grand plan.
Director and writer Radu Mihaileanu sets up the story with deft economy: Andreï and his friend Sacha (Dmitri Nazarov), an ambulance driver and cello player, drive around Moscow rounding up the old crew. Their former manager Ivan (Valeri Barinov), a stalwart Communist who betrayed them to the authorities way back when, is asked to help pull off the 50-piece hoodwink.
Andreï is ashamed of the current Bolshoi, and there is a more general lamenting of the state of Russian culture and excellence, an implied mourning of the good old days when an artist's or athlete's livelihood literally depended on delivering perfection to the state. Ivan is the most openly nostalgic, still running pinko rallies and hiring extras to fill them out. (In one of the funniest side-plots, Andreï's wife supplies enemy gangsters with extras who attend their gaudy weddings, which are held in small amphitheaters.) The irony of a Communist regime that had every Russian (except Andreï, of course) fending only for himself seems lost on Ivan, who nevertheless agrees to negotiate a list of demands with the French.
Class and nationalist tensions pervade these scenes, if never to more than farcical effect. The Russians are bent on showing the French they still rule the classical arts, even as they rely on and play up received wisdom about the Slavic temperament. They have comically outdated ideas about asserting their status (Ivan insists on a boat tour of the city and dinner at a restaurant that hasn't been hot -- and hasn't even existed -- since 1982) and pull their musicians from every walk of life. Andreï's main request is that a young French soloist named Anne-Marie Jacquet (Mélanie Laurent) accompany the orchestra. His hidden connection to her is drawn out over the group's eventual arrival in Paris (after acquiring a raft of fake passports and visas) and the ultimate performance of a Tchaikovsky piece.
The old orchestra does not manage a single rehearsal; a mass defection takes place as soon as they reach France. The group abandons their leader, drinking and demanding money before disappearing into the city. After taking pains to demonstrate that class and artistic sensibility are not the privilege of the well-born, Mihaileanu turns these underdogs into reckless curs.
The outbursts and confrontations between the various factions grow enervating; the French scenes comprise a poorly paced build-up to a concert that might make you regret wishing that actual music (if not rehearsal) had featured more prominently throughout. The climactic scene is an interminable feast of art-as-epiphany cliché: Laurent and Guskov make big, meaningful eyes at each other as the latter conducts the former through her first Tchaikovsky piece. They exchange look after look after look of sublime communion and understanding as the piece builds and builds and builds. And builds. Much like The Concert, the concert starts out strong but gets muddled in sentiment when it comes time to soar.