The Concert

The Concert (Le Concert, 2009) is a tragicomedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Radu Mihaileanu. Andrei Filipov once led the Bolshoi orchestra. Now he mops the floors of the same hall — Brezhnev personally ended his career for refusing to fire his Jewish musicians. Then a fax from Paris's Théâtre du Châtelet lands in his hands.

So he hatches an absurd scam: round up his old disbanded players and pass them off as the real Bolshoi. Trouble is, thirty years scattered them everywhere — cab drivers, market sellers, drunks, a violinist who now plays weddings. Aleksei Guskov plays the conductor like a man with one unfinished note still stuck in his chest. Waiting in Paris is a young violin soloist, Anne-Marie Jacquet (Mélanie Laurent), tied to the orchestra's past by a secret she doesn't know she carries.

For half its runtime this is loud, chaotic comedy about Russians loose in Paris. Then it turns into the Tchaikovsky concerto that was cut off three decades ago. That closing performance is worth sitting through every bit of the mess before it. Stream The Concert (2009) online on iFILM.