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MARGUERITE Send This Review to a Friend
Inspired by a real-life story in the United States, director Xavier Giannoli has brilliantly re-located the situation to France in the 1920s, with the fabulous French actress Catherine Frot giving an astonishingly effective portrait of a wealthy woman, Marguerite Dumont, who thinks she is a talented opera singer but in reality can’t carry a tune, yet those close to her, for a variety of reasons, cannot bring themselves to speak the truth. “Marguerite,” filled with charm, comedy and emotion, emerges as one of the major, thoroughly enjoyable films of the year thus far.
As bizarre as such a tale is, events around the story that inspired this one are even more bizarre. The person recalled by this captivating French version was Florence Foster Jenkins who lived in the first half of the 20th century, became an icon for her inability and and eventually sang off-key in Carnegie Hall. You can Google her for details. A film has been made with Meryl Streep playing Jenkins and it is due for release later this year.
Giannoli, who wrote the film in association with Marcia Romano, was wise not to try a conventional bio-pic, but created a character who stands on her own. Frot is superb as Marguerite and makes us care for her even as we laugh at the atrocious singing in the concerts she gives for her select groups. When she builds up toward a major public concert, we fear for her if she learns the truth. Her desire to sing is an obsession, and Frot offers a complex woman who, we know, must eventually be in for a fall.
Marguerite is in an unhappy marriage with George Dumont, well-played by André Marcon, who has a mistress. He is protective but embarrassed by his wife being laughed at, yet he is torn about the need to convince her of her folly. One of the most effective supporting performances is by Denis Mpunga as Madelbos, Marguerite’s aide, who both watches over her and also has his own agenda of photographing her to make a pictorial record of the phenomenon.
There is a smarmy journalist hanger-on who writes about Marguerite, and there is a young woman opera singer who really has talent. Also colorful is a has-been opera singer hired to tutor Marguerite, and we see his inevitable exasperation. Among the other characters is a doctor who has figured out a way to reveal the truth to Marguerite.
The film is great to look at, with its period dress, elaborate sets and locations that reflect the wealth of the elite and capture the aura of France in the 1920s. We are also carried into the world of opera with a serious score. Frot does some of her own singing, but there is also dubbing for the wilder parts. (Frot has said that it is especially difficult to deliberately sing badly.)
Ever at the center is the grand performance by Frot, who manages to earn our sympathy as a woman who longs to be more than just a rich, unhappy wife and is in pursuit of a dream that can never be realized. A Cohen Media Group release. Reviewed March 11, 2016.
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