The film critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle, got it right: The Concert is a “pure fairy tale.” It opens with a man conducting musicians with the elegant movements of his hands—the air, the hands moving through the air, the music filling the air of the concert space. All of a sudden, a cell phone erupts, the great music stops and is replaced by a silly ringtone, and we learn that the hands were not of a conductor but of a lowly janitor, standing alone in the balcony. The janitor then turns out to be a man with an amazing past—during the cold war years of Brezhnev, he fell from grace because he refused to fire the Jews in his orchestra. This is his story. What happens next?
One day, while cleaning the big man’s office, the fallen conductor chances to catch a fax sent by the Théâtre du Châtelet. The fax invites him and his original orchestra to perform for the richest frogs. There the movie has its motive—now the movie needs desire. That desire comes in the splendid form of Anne-Marie Jacquet (Mélanie Laurent—Paris, Inglourious Basterds). She is a world-famous violinist, and the janitor hires her (his desire) to play a concerto by Tchaikovsky. That is all the plot you need to know. Let’s spend the rest of the review contemplating Mélanie Laurent. She is not striking like Béatrice Dalle, or obviously erotic like Virginie Ledoyen, or downright voluptuous like Ludivine Sagnier—hers is a very basic, very plain, yet very direct beauty. Her eyes, her lips, her cheekbones—none of this offers a surprise, a mystery, an aura. Her beauty hits you immediately and completely. This is Mélanie Laurent, the star of this big and often wacky but never bad film. 
