Butler's Cinema Scene

Catherine Frot

“MARGUERITE” My rating: B+

129 minutes | MPAA rating: R

You can approach “Marguerite”  as a cruel joke, a satire of a wannabe opera singer who doesn’t realize just how awful her voice is.

Fine. Come to laugh. But you’ll leave in a much more sober and contemplative frame of mind.

Xavier Giannoli’s lush period film is set in the early 1920s and was inspired by Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944), an American socialite who despite a total absence of vocal talent forged a career as an operatic soprano. She became a minor celebrity based on the entertainment value of her off-key recitals.

Giannoli’s fictional “heroine” is Baroness Marguerite Dumont (a spectacular Catherine Frot), who as the film begins is hosting a charity concert on her estate outside Paris.  The highlight of the event will be a rare performance by the Baroness.

A tone-deaf, music-mangling performance, as it turns out, one marked by grandiose theatrical gestures and much caterwauling.

The members of the Mozart Society, which runs mostly on donations from the Baroness, applaud furiously. Others in the crowd — like Lucien (Sylvain Dieuaide) and Kyrill (Aubert Fenoy), two young artistic radicals who have crashed the party — are simultaneously appalled and delighted.

Kyrill declares the performance — and Marguerite’s total lack of self-awareness — a daring new art form (“She’s so sublimely off-key”).  Lucien critiques the concert for a Paris newspaper, parsing his words so carefully that it can be read either as a ringing endorsement or a devastating pan.

The ever-hopeful Baroness takes the review as proof that she should move her career out of the parlor and onto the world’s great concert stages. The plot of “Marguerite” is about her determination to share her “gift” with the world, and the efforts to prevent that great embarrassment.

Michel Fau

Her husband George (Andre Marcon), a penniless noble who married Marguerite for her fortune and keeps a mistress, fears a public performance will be humiliating not only for his wife  but to his reputation.

Meanwhile Marguerite’s butler, Madelbos (Denis Mpunga), shields his mistress from all negativity (he censors her newspapers lest she find herself being ridiculed in print) and spends part of each day photographing his employer costumed as heroines of the great operas. It all feeds into her delusion.

A film like this works only if it nails exactly the right tone, which in this case is expertly limned by Frot, winner of the Caesar (the French Oscar) for best actress for her work here.

Sylvain Dieuaide and Aubert Fenoy

Her Marguerite is blind to her musical inadequacies, certainly, but she’s not vain. She’s charming, sweet, and her devotion to great music is infectious. It’s not so much that she wants acclaim as she wants to be a vessel through which great music is celebrated. In that regard her quest is selfless.

Initially we’re tempted to sneer. By the time it’s over were half in love with Marguerite and her musical madness.

Along the way writer/director Giannoli delivers an uproarious recreation of a Dada “happening” in which a flag-draped Marguerite is the central attraction. Late in  the proceedings he introduces Michel Fau as a hilariously effete over-the-hill tenor who for the right money agrees to coach Marguerite for her big public debut.

And Giannoli references other great movies, especially “Sunset Boulevard” (Marguerite’s protective butler is an obvious incarnation of Erich Von Stroheim’s stage-managing Max) and “Citizen Kane” (the idea of an untalented voice being foisted off on the public). It must be noted, though, that while those two movies are emotionally chilly, “Marguerite” develops great affection for its deluded heroine.

It’s all fabulously entertaining. And on a deeper level “Marguerite” is one of the most perceptive films ever made about the nature of art and the impulse to create, discovering a bizarre nobility even in “art” that makes your ears bleed.

| Robert W. Butler