Loosely inspired by the life of American socialite Florence Foster Jenkins (of whom there is an impending film mere weeks from cinematic release), Marguerite, directed by Xavier Giannoli is a poignant tale of one woman’s search for meaning in a life deceptively bereft of it.
To all intents and purposes, Baroness Marguerite Dumont (a superlative Catherine Frot who throughout is equal parts thwarted romantic and girlishly excitable) seems to have it all.
A sprawling estate that is the height of 1920s opulence, servants of considerable number at her disposal including the devoted Madelbos (Denis Mpunga), the latest mod-cons including state of the art cars, and the undying (though we learn later, conditional) support of her wealthy peers.
The one thing the aspiring tone-deaf opera singer, who is the patron of the Amadeus Society which holds regular concerts of opera and classical music in her stately home is the love of her husband Georges Dumont (André Marcon) who views her as a “freak”, a woman unaware that she is routinely embarrassing herself with her operatic recitals, delivered by a voice so unsuited to the task that she sounds like a mix of a dog barking and caterwauling chimpanzee.
He has no respect or love left for her, regularly missing her in-house concerts thanks to “car problems” – his regular breakdowns are an act of self-sabotage, an attempt to do what so few others in her circle can do which is miss her dreadful singing – and maintaining a mistress who receives all the love that Marguerite so desperately wishes was still hers to claim.
While the aspiring opera singer is not aware of the mistress’s existence, she does notice that Georges, the one person close to her besides Madelbos whose opinion she truly values – she accepts the hypocritical fawning of her fellow socialites but you suspect she secretly knows it is all a charade, accepting it purely because it serves the necessary purpose of bolstering her battered self-esteem – lives a whole life away from her.
A life, she admits to him in one of the more heartrending scenes in a film that veers between hilariously delusion and touching loss, had been leached of almost everything of value by his unpalatable mix of entrenched indifference and controlling cruelty.
It’s precisely because so much has been denied to her, despite her wealth, that she clings so earnestly to the opera singing.
Granted she does have an authentic love of the artform, and music in general, mentioning at one point to a friend of her new friend, the much younger Lucien Beaumont (Sylvain Dieuaide) that she owes 1347 manuscripts as well as many costumes and props, which she regularly asks Madelbos to photograph her in.
But this is not the only reason she pursues a dream for which she is so manifestly untalented – she is trying to recapture the love of Georges by proving to him that she is consummately good at something.
And the great tragedy of it all is that she is unaware she will never be the great opera singer she dreams of being; whether by deliberate self-delusion or a natural lack of self-awareness, Marguerite is convinced that she is capable of becoming one of the great singers of her age.
Of course she never will be that, and Giannoli draws both great humour and stinging pathos from her inability to perceive the truth, Marguerite becoming a salient lesson of the lengths to which people will go in the pursuit of self-worth and self-acceptance.
Frot brings Marguerite to life in all her contradictory sweet complexity with consummate ease; while she first comes across as a self-consumed socialite, trapped in the gilding of her age, you soon realise that a deeply-grieved little girl lost resides within, one seeking freedom, genuine friendship, which she finds in a motley group including Beaumont, singer Hazel (Christa Theret) and her past-his-prime singing teacher Atos Pezzini / Divo (Michel Fau), and above all the love of her husband.
This love, and the prospect of a self-worth affirming singing career both remain beyond her oblivious grasp – though you do witness Georges beginning to recall why he fell in love with her in the first place, a too-little, too-late recalling of the lost romance she so craves – form the emotionally-wrenching epicentre of a film that despite its glittery though overlong-articulated charms, is brutally honest about what drives us to pursue the things we do in life.
In true French cinematic style, which never stints on brutally honest assessments of the human condition and their less-than-ideal, sometimes tragic consequences, Marguerite unflinchingly strips away the many layers of its protagonist’s life revealing an achingly woman clinging to a dream that everyone but she knows will never amount to anything.
What sustains the movie, even during its overly-plumped third act which strings out a finale of suitably operatic proportions (though leavened by some very real, very dark emotions) is its willingness to not sugarcoat the business of life.
It would have been all to easy to paint Marguerite as an unending figure of ridicule who nonetheless triumphs over the sniggering and mocking hidden from her to become the great opera diva she always knew herself to be; in other words, an inspiring tale of success beyond all odds, including a dearth of any real talent, that all of us, carrying our own great and small delusional wanna-be moments can take as solace that our dreams can also come true one day.
Marguerite, sustained by Giannoli’s skillful direction and the script he developed over ten years with Marcia Romano, and an outstandingly moving performance by Frot, takes a whole other route entirely, honestly asking us to consider whether a dream is worth it if it comes with so many conditional elements, many of which it will never be able to satisfy.
Even so, in the end Marguerite is far from an object of disdain and ridicule, becoming instead like everyone of us, simply wanting to be loved and accepted for who she is, and hoping beyond hope that she can play some part in that, despite the odds.