A messy, comedic sprawl that leaks at the seams, the Romanian director Radu Mihaileanu’s Concert aspires to be something like a French-Russian answer to The Producers. Lunging wildly between satirical farce and teary sentimentality, the movie follows the misadventures of a ragtag symphony orchestra that travels from Moscow to Paris under false pretenses.
Hoary stereotypes abound. Drunken Russians, thieving Gypsies, crooked oligarchs and zealous former Communist apparatchiks: All are caricatured in a story whose multiple subplots tumble over one another in a chaotic pileup.
The protagonist of The Concert, Andrei Filipov (Alexei Guskov), is a former musical wunderkind and conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra who fell from grace 30 years ago in an anti-Semitic purge near the end of the Brezhnev era. After flouting authority by hiring Jewish musicians, Andrei was rudely ousted midconcert during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, a romantic war horse that the movie milks for
its last ounce of schmaltz and
then some.
Reduced to toiling as a janitor in the concert hall in which he was fired, the miserable Andrei still dreams of restoration. His enterprising wife earns money by hiring “extras” to attend underpopulated political rallies and parties. Andrei seizes his chance for redemption when he intercepts a fax from the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, inviting the Bolshoi Orchestra to substitute at the last minute for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Instead of putting the invitation into the proper hands, he and his best friend, Sacha Grossman (Dmitry Nazarov), a bearish cellist, secretly recruit the remnants of the old orchestra, many of whom have given up classical music. One supplies the sound effects for pornographic films, another drives a cab, and others are found fiddling in a Gypsy camp.
During negotiations with the persnickety Parisian impresario Olivier Duplessis (Francois Berleand), Andrei grandly insists that the musicians dine at a chic restaurant that has changed hands and turns out to be a belly-dancing emporium. Most important, he insists the featured piece be the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. For reasons that are not fully explained until the end of the movie in crudely inserted flashbacks, the soloist must be a beautiful and celebrated young violinist, Anne-Marie Jacquet (Melanie Laurent), who has never played the piece before.
Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) is a radiant screen presence among an otherwise ramshackle assemblage, and the movie bets all its chips on her performance to deliver a shamelessly tear-jerking payoff.
Unless you buy The Concert’s nonsensical premise — the film was written by Mihaileanu, Alan-Michel Blanc and Matthew Robbins — appreciation of this satirical fairy tale is next to impossible. The movie never satisfactorily explains how the musicians acquire their instruments, travel visas and concert attire in only two weeks. In one bit this raucous, ragtag orchestra lines up in a Moscow airport to receive fake passports without anyone blinking an eye.
Once in Paris they storm the city like a barbarian horde, demanding their money, getting drunk and scattering hither and yon. The Concert doesn’t even pretend to understand the workings of the classical music world. The night of the event the members of the motley ensemble straggle into the theater (some of them late) to take their seats and play without having had a single rehearsal. The harder this desperately obsequious circus of a movie tries to entertain, the more it falls short.
April 28 to May 4 During the Japanese colonial era, a city’s “first” high school typically served Japanese students, while Taiwanese attended the “second” high school. Only in Taichung was this reversed. That’s because when Taichung First High School opened its doors on May 1, 1915 to serve Taiwanese students who were previously barred from secondary education, it was the only high school in town. Former principal Hideo Azukisawa threatened to quit when the government in 1922 attempted to transfer the “first” designation to a new local high school for Japanese students, leading to this unusual situation. Prior to the Taichung First
When the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese forces 50 years ago this week, it prompted a mass exodus of some 2 million people — hundreds of thousands fleeing perilously on small boats across open water to escape the communist regime. Many ultimately settled in Southern California’s Orange County in an area now known as “Little Saigon,” not far from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, where the first refugees were airlifted upon reaching the US. The diaspora now also has significant populations in Virginia, Texas and Washington state, as well as in countries including France and Australia.
On April 17, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) launched a bold campaign to revive and revitalize the KMT base by calling for an impromptu rally at the Taipei prosecutor’s offices to protest recent arrests of KMT recall campaigners over allegations of forgery and fraud involving signatures of dead voters. The protest had no time to apply for permits and was illegal, but that played into the sense of opposition grievance at alleged weaponization of the judiciary by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to “annihilate” the opposition parties. Blamed for faltering recall campaigns and faced with a KMT chair
Article 2 of the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China (中華民國憲法增修條文) stipulates that upon a vote of no confidence in the premier, the president can dissolve the legislature within 10 days. If the legislature is dissolved, a new legislative election must be held within 60 days, and the legislators’ terms will then be reckoned from that election. Two weeks ago Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) proposed that the legislature hold a vote of no confidence in the premier and dare the president to dissolve the legislature. The legislature is currently controlled
RSS