How did Radu Mihaileanu’s recent farce/tear-jerker,
“The Concert” still manage to be a movie that one does not regret having gone to see? And why does it manage to elicit some sobs even from a seasoned cynic? It is not because of any great depth:
No, music is not about attaining that “ultimate harmony.” No, violinists that are sent to their deaths in a Siberian penal colony do not keep playing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto obsessively in their heads and fingers till the last. No, they do not establish posthumous psychic contact with their progeny that way either. The treatment of discrimination against Jews in Russia does sound a few true notes (even though it’s mostly the historic doctor’s plot conspiracy theory transformed into a (mostly) fictional musicians’ plot) despite the slap-stick caricatures of both Jewish and Gypsy stereotypes. It’s certainly not Aleksei Guskov’s inept imitation of conducting, nor the almost as inauthentic mash-up of Mélanie Laurent’s faux solo, edited into a composite duo with whoever was actually playing the fiddle.
But the Tchaikovsky really is beautiful, Mélanie really is pretty, and acts fairly well — if not always like a real musician. And the longing for lost loved ones resonates despite the superficiality and artificiality of the particulars.
And one of the only two bits of subtlety in this crowd-pleaser (the other being a moment of Mahler), is the Gypsy subtheme (subliminal for most, who will not know when it is Romanian Gypsy music that the Romanian director of this Russian/French farce, Radu Mihaileanu, uses to herald and accompany the action), both as a metaphor for it all, and as a light counterpoint to the Tchaikovsky theme.
There is even the (no doubt unintended) irony of the fact that Tchaikovsky’s music was for a time perversely undervalued — by snobs and pedants, mostly in the West, perhaps not in Russia — as being too sentimental, something of a tear-jerker, playing for popularity rather than for “ultimate harmony.”
Justice has long since been done, fortunately, for this genius of the first rank (P.I.Tch.).