Zagreb. A group of music students arrives at a Kaptol apartment and bring a piano with them, where they find the former piano player Ema, now reclusive. Her story: in 1 9 1 4, Ema is a little girl and likes to play the piano of the store owner for employs her mother, the cleaning lady. As the news of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand spreads, the store owner sells the piano, Ema wants to stop the sale, but people accidentally drop the piano on her, breaking her hip and leaving her with a limp... 1 9 2 2. Ema plays a piano and is spotted by piano teacher Berislav across the next building, but since she limps, she decides to not go on a date with him... 1 9 2 9. Ema and a band of three other musicians is summoned during a rainy night to play after the wedding of Jurica and Greta, but one of the guests bought a radio so he doesn't want to waste money on live music... 1 9 4 1. During World War II, Ema spots Berislav being chased and shot by the Ustashe. Back in present, Ema collapses on the piano.
Included in a film critics' poll as one of the 10 best Croatian films of all time, Branko Belan's "The Concert" is still a notch below all this hype, dazzling more with its modern style of flashbacks, but underwhelming in its drama parts and emotions. Told as a series of four flashbacks in the life of a tragic piano player, Ema (a solid Nada Skrinjar), the movie is surprising in denying Ema her due as the main protagonist, and instead pushes her in the background, only as a passive observer of events, until the viewers feel as if she is the supporting character in her own lifestory. This imbalance wrecks "The Concert". The director Belan has a sense for some fine directed moments: for instance, when Ema, as a little girl, observes a newspaper reporter typing on the typewriter, there is an association dissolve to a scene of two hands playing the piano keyboard. In another story, while limping slightly, the grown-up Ema spots a disabled man, barely walking with a cane on the streets holding on to the hand of another man, while later the camera zooms in to a close up of a random woman observing the limping Ema in the same pitiful manner, whereby the movie says everything the viewers need to know about why she would all of a sudden be ashamed to go on a date with Berislav. The best sequence is the one in the fourth story, where Ema is in a bar, observing a singer and a piano player, the camera zooms in on Ema's face and then there is a flashback to a brilliantly directed sequence of her playing the piano on stage at the national theater, wearing a wedding dress, imagining all the people she knew from her life to be in the audience. The leitmotive of a piano influencing her life and emotional state throughout her lifetime is clever and well made, implying the fatalism of destiny, yet overall one wishes Ema was the leading catalyst of the story, and not just the mechanical toy of this fatalism, whereas some random moments of episodic characters lead nowhere (for instance, Edmund, convicted of embezzlement, or his deranged father, a retired military official, committing suicide in the bathtub).
Grade:++
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