On DVD: "The Concert"

The Concert, or Le Concert in its original incarnation, is a title almost guaranteed to set a certain demographic running to their nearest comfortably appointed artiplex, giddy with anticipation of a civilised, cosy, bilingual entertainment. Radu Mihaileanu, the Romanian director who made his name with such middleweight dramas as 1998's Train of Life (about Orthodox Jews defying the Nazis) and 2005's Live and Become (concerning an Ethiopian refugee's progress across Europe), here takes his foot off the gas a little, arriving at a whimsical fiction about a Russian conductor deemed an enemy of the state under the Brezhnev regime. Reduced to performing nothing more than menial janitorial duties at the concert hall in which he once wielded a mean baton, Andrei Simoniovich Filipov (Aleksei Guskov) ends up roaring around in a battered ambulance, attempting to reunite his old orchestra players - and pass them off as the prestigious Bolshoi ensemble - in advance of a concert at an illustrious Parisian conservatoire.

Mihaileanu and his co-writers paint in broad, satiric strokes: here's the aging Communist Party zealot (Valeri Barinov) chuffed at the fact the Parisian hotel he's secured for himself can boast a full three stars, and here's the gaudy tastelessness of an oligarch's wedding celebrations, which begin with a cello-versus-electric guitar duet, and descend into outright gunfire. It's rarely subtle - clock the Jewish trumpeter who uses the trip as an opportunity to flog black market caviar, or the French-Algerian restauranteur who refers to himself as Abdul Al-Qaeda - but there are fixed and sincere points in the playing: Guskov cuts a touching, melancholy figure striving to make up for lost time, and there's solid work from Miou-Miou as an old family friend, and from Mélanie Laurent [see photo above], late of Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, as the star violinist Filipov rediscovers in Paris. "The notes all look for harmony," the conductor tells the latter over dinner one night, and the film appears to have been conceived in a similar spirit of transcontinental unity; for those so inclined, le DVD vous attend.

The Concert is available on DVD from Monday.