Marguerite (2016; Xavier Giannoli)

GRADE: B

By Daniel Barnes

*Opens tomorrow at the Embarcadero Center Cinemas in San Francisco, the Albany Twin in Berkeley, the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the Camera 3 in San Jose and the Aquarius in Palo Alto.

A major award winner at this year’s Cesars, Marguerite stars the wonderful Catherine Frot as Marguerite Dumont.  A wealthy 1920s socialite, Marguerite fancies herself a great opera diva, despite her nails-on-the-chalkboard singing voice.

Her patronage of a snobby music club has purchased Marguerite a captive private audience.  However, when her party gets crashed by an unscrupulous critic (“Is there any other kind?” he laughed, washing his underarms and crotch with wads of payola), the dizzily unaware siren gets led onto the public stage.

Writer-director Xavier Giannoli mines a wealth of material from a one-joke premise.  The fantastic accomplishment of Frot’s performance is that we both laugh at and pity Marguerite.  We regard her celebrity as both a travesty and a tragedy.  Marguerite touches on ideas of image and public perception and the creative spirit, and it seems primarily concerned with the ways that we indulge the filthy rich, either by compulsion or desperation.  I thought a lot about billionaire James Dolan’s boomer rock band while watching this film.

Unfortunately, it ultimately settles for something a little more tranquil and trite.  Inspired by the American socialite/incompetent opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins, the character of Marguerite is too much of an easy joke to fill the entire film.  Meanwhile, much of the most interesting stuff occurs on the margins. That includes the strange journey of her somewhat faithful servant Madelbos (Denis Mpunga), who serves as her protector, abettor, silent director and secret exploiter.

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