Marguerite

Based on the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, a famously bad opera singer (who will be portrayed by Meryl Streep later this year), Marguerite transposes the character to the Paris of the 1920s, and creates something wonderfully different.

Bored socialite Marguerite Dumount (Catherine Frot)  is obsessed with singing, a pity she has no talent for it. A greater pity still that no-one has had the nerve to tell her this. Not her poor industrialist husband (Andre Marcon), nor her suffering singing coach (Michel Fau). All want something from her in their own way, but can they actually put her on stage for a public performance?

There is a reason theatre is represented by two muses masks  -one laughing, the other in tears. It's ripe ground for drama.  Marguerite embodies this conflict between the comic and the tragic with keen precision. It is a line this film's script strides so well, changing our expectations, playing with our allegiances. What starts off gut-wrenchingly funny, will bring different tears by the end.

This is personified none more so than by the character of Marguerite Dumount herself. Pompous, deluded, and ridiculous at first inspection,  Frot brings us into this socialites' world and makes us feel for her. We see the tragic motivation behind her delusions, the fragility of her world and the generosity of her spirit. Through sheer charisma we're forced to empathise with the absurd, and barrack for Marguerite at the end. Hence when the final tragedy unfolds, it effects the audience deeply.

Marguerite revels in the period, not merely for the detail of the sets and costuming, but also for the theme. Its time and place are a hotbed of creativity and a redefinition of art. Dadaism, jazz, futurism, surrealism, modernism, classicism, romanticism - all mesh in this film giving us a rich stage for this preposterous character to stride. This environment allows director Xavier Gianolli to have a rather complex discussion about the creation of art and question the extrinsic factors that give it worth. It is a deep script drawing on multiple threads, all given a detailed texture on screen tinged with a little absurdity. 

A very European take on the subject, the richness of script, character, visuals and setting more than make up for any third-act drag. Marguerite is excruciatingly funny, but moves beyond that to reveal a story that is as fragile, tragic and as human as the lady herself. 

Originally published in X-Press Magazine