The Concert

The Romanian-born Franco-Israeli writer-director Radu Mihaileanu made a most affecting picture five years ago called Live and Become , chronicling the life over 20 years of an Ethiopian child passed off by his dying mother as a Jewish refugee during Operation Moses, Mossad's 1984 airlift of persecuted Ethiopian Jews, and reared in Israel and France as a Jew. His latest picture, The Concert , which deals obliquely with a similar situation in reverse, is much less satisfactory. The central character is Andrei Filipov (Aleksei Guskov), a once famous Soviet conductor purged by the KGB in 1980 for his dangerously decent treatment of Jewish musicians and now a cleaner at the Bolshoi. One day he discovers a fax inviting the Bolshoi orchestra (which he despises) to fill in at a prominent Parisian theatre. He conceals the message and gets together a band of fellow Russian outcasts to fill the date. There's a good comic idea here with some odd echoes of Good Bye Lenin! and The Lives of Others , and it opens well enough. But it gradually collapses under the weight of manifest improbability, poor timing and ultimately its outrageous sentimentality.