The Concert
Last night I went to see The Concert, an enjoyable piece of light relief from the rather hectic goings-on at work over the past few weeks. The plot revolves around a conductor branded an "enemy of the people" during Brezhnev's rule in the Soviet Union, who, 30 years later, is an office cleaner at the Bolshoi. He happens to intercept a fax inviting the orchestra to perform in Paris, and decides to rediscover his musicians and take them himself, in place of the regular orchestra. The characters have a variety of motives for going along with his plan, and of course there are many challlenges and unlikely turns on the way. I particularly liked the subtitles, which were frequently in somewhat broken English, reflecting the way the characters were often uncertainly speaking foreign languages to each other themselves. I have two criticisms, though: firstly (and unusually), I felt there wasn't really enough time taken to set the scene right at the beginning - the film jumps almost immediately into receiving the fax message. Secondly, some of the characters (Jewish and gipsy) are depicted in a way that could be caricature, or could be stereotype, which made me a little uneasy. But I enjoyed it nonetheless, and some of the plot twists were rather clever.