Movie Nation

“The Musicians” is a droll comedy about four string highly-strung string players who must come together as a “quartet” to perform an original composition on four legendary instruments for a worldwide classical music TV audience.

If I haven’t scared you off yet, let me point out that it’s in French, and the title is actually “Les musiciens” in its native tongue.

Everybody not interested in the subject moved on? Good. Now that the riff raff have wandered, the rest of us can revel in the subtle and ever-so-dry classical music comedy that director Grégory Magne and co-writer Haroun have conjured up.

It’s a burlesque of fragile egos and mismatched personalities, of exquisite instruments played by real musicians who know their craft and know the “types” drawn to their sort of work. There’s little that’s broad about it and nothing that could be mistaken for farce as performed La Comédie-Française. But there are lots of chuckles at personality clashes and vanities and the odd moment that approaches the sublime.

A renowned luthier (François Ettori) gives the confirmation that sets our plot in motion. He’s run a proctoscope inside a cello and confirmed that this instrument is by Antonio Stradivari, that the chisel marks identify it as not only from the peak era of the greatest violin maker’s work, but that it’s from “the same tree, perhaps the same board” (in French with English subtitles) as three other instruments.

This is the famed (and apparently fictional) “San Domenico” collection, four instruments ordered and made and then forfeited to a bank leading to long, colorful and traveled performing lives in the ensuing centuries since Stradivari worked at Piazza San Domenico in the Italian city of Cremona.

Astrid (Valérie Donzelli) must have this instrument to fulfill her father’s passion — to own all four “San Domenico” instruments, from the same tree, and have four of the greatest musicians in the world play them as a string quartet.

It doesn’t matter how impractical and pricey this turns out to be — “ten million,” is the price of the cello, she guesses. No, not Euros or dollars. Pounds. Her brother’s (Nicolas Bridet) protests notwithstanding, Astrid was daddy’s choice to chair the board of their highway construction company. And she’s hellbent on helping him realize his impractical dream.

She lands a vain superstar George (Mathieu Spinosi) violinist whose album covers “make you look like Michael Bolton.” The perfectionist cellist Lise (Marie Vialle) and brooding violinist Peter (Daniel Garlitsky) have “history.”

Violist Apolline (Emma Ravier)? She’s a young, perky blonde who never studied at a conservatory, but a polished Youtube star with a large social media presence. If she’s a classical music influencer, that may have something to do with posting bikini shots of herself on vacation.

Once Astrid wins the auction for the cello, she summons all four to a family estate built to house the instruments, with rehearsal rooms, the peace and quiet of nature with no wifi to distract them and a hottub that doesn’t work.

The comedy comes from the lightly clashing egos — George has the biggest, a diva who starts every sentence as concert master of this quartet with “I,” something Peter — reluctantly here with a woman he used to play with and love — never tires of pointing out.

Astrid’s choice of music, a never-performed work by a favorite living composer of her father’s, Charlie Beaumont, is odd. Ancient instruments like these gathered together for a showcase would seem to suggest baroque or classical era quartets to mark such an august occasion.

As the broadcast and recording contract deals are worked out and the concert in an acoustically pristine old church looms, the players struggle with the music and the highhanded way George runs the rehearsals. Astrid gets desperate enough to beg Beaumont himself (Frédéric Pierrot) to give up his life of seclusion, recording birdsong in the wild as inspiration, to come in and help.

It’s a hard sell as he likes his solitude and had given up on “ever hearing” this quartet he composed thirty years before. Even after he relents, he’s reluctant to tangle with these egos, and he’s not sure he remembers what he was thinking when he composed the work. Something to do with the sounds of “starlings,” maybe?

In any event, reaquainting himself with a work Astrid’s father loved only confirms Charlie’s fears about it.

“I hate my piece.”

Can this concert be saved?

Casting real musicians to actually play the work in question may have been a gimmick, but it lends the picture an authenticity rare for a screen comedy. The feuding players, clashing styles and egos and Apolline’s cover-sharing on social media and sophmoric hijinks could doom the entire enterprise.

But the music always comes first, and whatever disparate backgrounds these four share, Magne (“Perfumes” was his) lovingingly lets us see them rediscover that commitment and the joy it brings.

An impromptu jam is the best scene in “The Musicians,” an offhand, fireside performance of a classic American folk lament made famous by Bill Monroe, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Robert Plant and Allison Krause, Nirvana and Lead Belly.

“In the Pines” is a tune every “musician” should and would know, plucked and bowed and sung with geniune soul here by musicians who know “classical music” didn’t end with Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Valérie Donzelli,
Frédéric Pierrot, Mathieu Spinosi, Emma Ravier,
Marie Vialle and, Nicolas Bridet,
François Ettori and Daniel Garlitsky

Credits: Directed by Grégory Magne, scripted by Haroun and Grégory Magne. An Outsider Pictures release.

Running time: 1:42