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