Daily Archives: Saturday, March 26, 2016

  • Marguerite

    Xavier Giannoli (2015)

    In 2006 Xavier Giannoli wrote and directed Quand j’étais chanteur, in which Gérard Depardieu starred as an aging dance-band singer.   In Giannoli’s latest film, Catherine Frot is Marguerite Dumont, a wealthy, late-middle-aged woman who loves to sing and – unlike everyone else who hears her voice – doesn’t realise that she can’t.  Set in and around Paris in 1920, the story of Marguerite is loosely based on the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, the American socialite whom Meryl Streep will play in the forthcoming Stephen Frears film.  The name and predicament of Giannoli’s heroine also bring to mind the Marx Brothers’ stooge Margaret Dumont, whose comic brilliance, according to Groucho, was thanks largely to her never getting the joke.  Marguerite, which Xavier Giannoli wrote with Marcia Romano, doesn’t treat its title character as the laughing stock that she is to her audiences in the film but the tone is uneasy, and the deliberate narrative pace sits oddly with the fabular and farcical elements of the plot.  This builds towards a one-night-only solo recital, given by Marguerite at a Paris theatre.  After hearing her sing opera badly for two hours, we now watch Marguerite degenerate into a melodramatic finale worthy of a bad opera.

    Catherine Frot (who rather resembles Lesley Manville) shows a lot of musical skill to sing so perfectly out of tune.  The persistent sadness in Frot’s eyes keeps the viewer wondering too if Marguerite may be more aware than anyone realises of what sort of noise she’s producing.  She isn’t, but Xavier Giannoli develops a connection that somewhat explains the sorrow behind Marguerite’s smiling, affable face to the world – a connection between the myth of her singing ability and the myth of her happy marriage.  When she sings in public, Marguerite always wants to know, before she starts, that her husband Georges (André Marcon) is in the audience.   Although horrified when she eventually discovers that Georges has a mistress (Astrid Whettnall), Marguerite already had reason to feel insecure.  Their union is childless and she’s now turned fifty; it’s suggested too that Georges married Marguerite for her money, which has always paid their considerable bills.  One of Giannoli’s more effective touches is the call of the peacocks in the grounds of the Dumonts’ home.   This piercing cry, heard regularly throughout Marguerite, suggests a vocal kindred spirit to the lady of the manor.  The discordant sound also functions as an expression of a lack of marital harmony inside it.

    The major running joke in the story is that no one will tell Marguerite the truth of how badly she sings.  Not the members of the music club whose patron she is, at the start of the film.  Not Georges:  his continuing reticence appears to reflect a larger reluctance to rock the boat, so that he can carry on deceiving Marguerite in other ways.   Not Atos Pezzini (Michel Fau), the over-the-hill opera singer who declines an invitation to be her voice coach until Madelbos (Denis Mpunga), Marguerite’s butler, threatens blackmail   (The ever-observant butler maintains a complete photographic record of his employer’s public performances.  His snaps also include graphic and potentially incriminating illustrations of Pezzini’s sexual preferences.)    It seems Madelbos himself keeps quiet about Marguerite’s terrible singing because perpetuating her fantasy is a route towards realising his own artistic potential, as a photographer.

    Catherine Frot won this year’s Best Actress César for her performance.  The award was hardly undeserved but the reality of Frot’s Marguerite is at odds with the more broadly comic and, especially, the cod-melodramatic aspects of the film.  The young newspaper critic Lucien Beaumont (Sylvain Dieuaide) and his friend Kyrill Von Priest (Aubert Fenoy), a kind of anarchist impresario, witness Marguerite’s startling rendition of the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute, at a fund-raiser for Great War orphans held at her home.  Lucien and Kyrille then arrange for her to appear in Marianne get-up and sing the Marseillaise at an épater les bourgeois happening in Paris.  This ends in a police raid and Marguerite, along with her radical new acquaintances, spends a night in the cells.  Because she’s oblivious to her shortcomings as a singer, we’re asked to believe too that this gracious, well-behaved woman doesn’t turn a hair at being arrested.

    The discrepancy between the woman that Catherine Frot creates and the storyline becomes a much bigger issue in the closing stages.  Marguerite strains her voice while practising for her big night and sees a laryngologist (Vincent Schmitt).  During her opening piece at the eventual recital, she reaches so desperately for a high note that her throat haemorrhages and she passes out.  The performance is abandoned.  As she recovers in hospital, the throat specialist – whose medical range continues to expand, as the plot requires – conducts and records on a gramophone a series of interviews with Marguerite.  These reveal she’s now so deeply deluded that she can recall the performances she’s given over the years in the great opera houses of the world.  The medic’s pièce de résistance is to record her singing and play it back to her.  Georges knows of the plan but decides, at the eleventh hour, that Marguerite shouldn’t hear the harsh truth.  His car has broken down again (this is the story’s minor running joke) en route to the hospital.  He telephones and speaks to Madelbos, who agrees to convey Georges’s desperate plea to the doctor but doesn’t, in order to take the culminating photograph in his series.  When the recording is played, Marguerite is so overcome that she collapses.  Georges arrives, too late, to cradle her in his arms.  Madelbos’s camera captures the moment.  Whether the shock has rendered her unconscious or killed her (I wasn’t sure), this ending is distressing, and cruel to the human being Catherine Frot has made of Marguerite.

    Marguerite is in two minds about its dramatis personae more generally.  This wouldn’t be a problem if someone who at first seemed a caricature turned out to be more complex but whenever that looks to be on the cards, the script either supplies a dead end or pushes things back into a conception of the character that’s broader and, at the same time, narrower.  In his write-up about the Queen of the Night number, Lucien Beaumont notes that Marguerite’s voice ‘contains a human truth that rends the heart’.  She, of course, misconstrues this as a rave review but Lucien is revealed as a more ambiguous and self-reproachful personality than he first appears, before being virtually dropped from the story – along with the relationship that never develops between him and the beautiful budding opera star Hazel Klein (Christa Théret).  As Georges, André Marcon creates a semblance of emotional depth, suggesting that Marguerite’s husband cares for her at least enough to want not to see her publicly ridiculed.  Xavier Giannoli, though, is keen for Georges to revert to being simply cold and unfaithful to Marguerite – in order that the failure of his final attempt to protect her can be just desserts.  Pezzoli’s acolytes include his very young lover Diego (Théo Cholbi) and a Tarot-reading bearded lady (Sophia Leboutte).  The variously camp members of this retinue are played for laughs, as grotesque and/or exploitative, until they undergo a late, sentimental conversion into supporters of the heroine.  In Marguerite, Xavier Giannoli ping-pongs between cartoon and humanist impulses.  The characters in the story, and the actors playing them, are ping-pong balls.

    22 March 2016

  • La femme infidèle

    Claude Chabrol (1969)

    Stéphane Audran is a beautiful woman and a fine actress but the bored hauteur which seems essential to her works best when she can play off it:  when she’s vulnerable and scared in Le Boucher or unassailably charming and sociable, whatever happens, in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.  In this film, Audran turns out not to be much different from what she appears to be.  The unfaithful wife of the title, Hélène Desvallées, is a brittle, rather cold mother, and a largely thwarted hedonist.  There’s no tension in the portrait (I kept thinking of the different layers Jeanne Moreau would have brought to a role like this).  Audran’s performance, in combination with Claude Chabrol’s coolly condescending view of the characters, means that La femme infidèle only really comes to life in the confrontation between Hélène’s insurance broker husband Charles (Michel Bouquet) and Victor Pegala (Maurice Ronet), the writer with whom she is having an affair – a confrontation which leads to the one murdering the other.

    When Charles, who has hired a private detective to spy on Hélène, visits Victor in his Neuilly apartment, the lover is taken by surprise.  There’s an odd femininity to Maurice Ronet’s face when he opens the door (is it eye make-up?) but the shift of power during the conversation between the two men is grimly funny, and Ronet and Michel Bouquet play the scene with great wit.  Charles begins by pretending that he and Hélène have an open marriage, that he knows all about Victor and that the latter’s affair with Hélène is the latest of many, all of them short-lived.  Victor relaxes a little and becomes more expansive.  Although Charles is increasingly uncomfortable hearing what Victor has to say, he asks for a tour of the apartment.  The husband finds the details of Victor’s liaison with his wife more and more intolerable – particularly a cigarette lighter which he recognises (it was a wedding anniversary gift to Hélène) on the table beside an unmade bed.  We sense that the cautious, self-regarding Charles went to see Victor wanting to find out more and to decide his next move.  Instead, he snaps and hits Victor over the head with an ornamental bust (of a woman) and the blow is a fatal one.   This is a taut, compelling sequence but it would be even stronger if the film hadn’t already seemed to be Charles’s story – if this fussy little cuckold, with his silly walk, had moved more gradually into the foreground.  Bouquet is good at suggesting the husband’s suspicion from the start – a suspicion masked by a pompous affability (and complicated by a streak of neediness) – but Charles is so much the established focus of attention that his turning into a killer doesn’t come as a bolt from the blue.

    When Charles first leaves Victor’s apartment after the murder, he’s extremely furtive and looks up nervously at a window cleaner on a ladder outside the block opposite.   When he returns a few minutes later and takes the same exit route, dragging to his car the corpse, which he’s wrapped in a white bed sheet, it never seems to worry him that his slow progress and eyecatching cargo might be observed.  He takes care to remove from the scene of the crime any trace of his presence (although he forgets to wipe his fingerprints from the inside of the cigarette lighter) yet he leaves his jacket lying around in his bedroom at home with the private detective’s photograph of Victor, and the Neuilly address written on the back, in the pocket – ready for Hélène to discover at the climax of the film. (It’s surprising that a man as boringly orderly as Charles would leave his jacket lying around, let alone with incriminating evidence inside it.)     Because Chabrol is aiming to create more than a piece of suspense his admirers don’t seem to mind such  weaknesses in the plot details but they detract from La femme infidèle as a crime story and consequently reduce its range of interest.

    Ginette Vincendeau’s introduction at BFI was repetitive but clear – except for what she said about the ‘transfer of guilt’ in La femme infidèle (how does both husband and wife feeling guilty, each for a different reason, amount to a transfer?) and when she said she wouldn’t mention which Hitchcock films Chabrol most obviously drew on here, before adding, ‘but you’ll find shades of Notorious, Psycho and Suspicion in particular’.   (Did she mean these were not the main Hitchcock references?)  The nods to Psycho are there at least in the killer’s cleaning up after the murder and getting rid of the corpse in a marshy expanse of water.  These are absorbing to watch but Chabrol doesn’t have Hitchcock’s gift, or appetite, for placing an image in an entertaining context that makes the image more extraordinary.  The Hitchcockian highlights in Chabrol are meticulously but self-consciously composed.  They have an academic feel and tend to stick out as highlights:  the blood dripping from the edge of a hilltop onto a schoolgirl eating her packed lunch in Le Boucher; in this film, the disappearance of the swaddled corpse into the swamp (which, from Charles’s point of view, happens agonisingly slowly).  Another instructive sequence is the one in which Charles, with the body in the boot of his car, has a minor collision with a lorry, gets an earful from the lorry driver, and is very soon at the centre of a crowd – including a policeman – that’s gathered to see what the commotion is about.  The force of the collision has damaged the car boot so that it’s jammed shut.  There’s a lengthy shot of the boot, surrounded by people but implacably concealing its contents.  The moment has suspense but it would have more if there were anything engaging about Charles – if we were rooting for him in some way (the way that you might sympathise with Norman Bates cleaning the shower cubicle if, the first time you saw Psycho, you hadn’t yet realised that Norman, not his mother, had murdered Marion Crane).

    A pair of policemen investigating the disappearance of Victor start calling at the Desvallées’ Versailles residence (a huge house in enormous grounds).  Michel Duchaussoy gives a well-judged performance as Duval, the detective who does the talking, but his silent sidekick Gobet (Guy Marly) is really irritating.  He keeps stroking his nose in such a deliberate way that the shadow movement doesn’t work in the way you feel it should – as something done unobtrusively but which plays on the nerves of Charles and Hélène.  Duval and Gobet eventually arrest Charles; his wife and young son watch the trio disappearing into the distance. The few reviews of the film that I’ve read suggest that his criminal act changes Hélène’s view of her husband – that he becomes a real man in her eyes because he was willing to kill out of love for her.   Since Stéphane Audran isn’t prepared to go beyond an enigmatic smile after she discovers the photograph of Victor in Charles’s jacket and resumes an inscrutable expression for the moment of his departure, I’m surprised anyone can infer such a definite conclusion.

    It’s striking that Chabrol is both compared with Hitchcock and regarded as an incisive social commentator – a label rarely applied, as far as I know, to Hitchcock.  I don’t know whether Chabrol is critiquing middle-class values in La femme infidèle but the decorous lovelessness of the Desvallées household seems too stylishly exaggerated to be typical of anything, and it’s presented so clinically that there doesn’t seem to be much at stake in its unravelling.  Michel (Stéphane de Napoli), the already unhappy and whingeing only child of the marriage, is no more likeable than his parents.  The music by Pierre Jansen, its jangling discordance establishing the substrate of the outwardly civilised marriage, is unpleasantly obvious.  (The film was remade in Hollywood in 2002 as Unfaithful, directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Diane Lane, Richard Gere and Olivier Martinez.)

    8 November 2009

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