Directed by Radu Mihaileanu
Andrei Filipov (Aleksei Guskov) conducts a rehearsal of the Bolshoi Orchestra in Moscow. When he is interrupted, we find out that he is only a cleaner at the great theatre, although he had once been the conductor thirty years ago. During the Brezhnev era, he was fired because he refused to remove Jewish musicians from the orchestra and was declared an ‘enemy of the people’. As chance would have it, he is cleaning the director’s office one evening when he intercepts a fax inviting the orchestra to Paris. He decides to get the old gang together to go to Paris because ‘the real one sucks anyway’.
Filipov has only has two weeks to find the 55 members of his old orchestra and organise all the logistics for the trip, but he is driven by a strong need to avenge the past and regain his reputation. Helped by his best friend Sacha (Dimitry Nazarov), he races around in an antiquated ambulance and the drama becomes more and more farcical as he gathers the group of misfits together and engages in illegal activities to fulfil his mission. Filipov has another agenda and he arranges for a young French violin virtuoso Anne-Marie Jacquet (Melanie Laurant) to join the orchestra.
It’s not often that a mad-cap comedy is infused with the most sublime classical music, but it is the music that really makes this film. Jewish Romanian-born French writer/director Mihaileanu creates laughter with his stereotypical characters and ludicrously impossible storyline, but he also induces tears with the passions that drive the characters. The drama moves on from redeeming the past to celebrating ideals that cannot be destroyed by politics or time. As Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto comes to a crescendo in the last minutes of the film, so many emotions come to the surface.
Lezly Herbert
