Singing is the most personal of the arts. Your body is your instrument. You sing with the same vocal cords that laugh, cry, moan, seeking to transform brute expression into musical patterns. Nowadays, most of us get our music electronically, and singing has been outsourced to professionals whose performances are perfected digitally. Because of the social risk inherent in singing, many people are too terrified to try. A new French film tells the story of one rich white woman whose passion for singing was matched only by her lack of love. Marguerite opens on April Fool's Day at Landmark Embarcadero.
Marguerite is a fictional French riposte to an upcoming Hollywood film named for actual historical, hysterical personage Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944). You can find the real Flo-J on YouTube and judge for yourself whether there's a voice there, despite her inability to stay on pitch, or whether she was lost in a dream of singing enabled by her wealth, vanity, and social connections. Whoever's telling the story, the delusional diva emerges as a complex character, equal parts idiocy and surrender, aspiration and ineptitude, folly and drive. There have been several stage plays, notably Peter Quilter's Glorious! Perhaps the most mindboggling treatment is Donald Collup's meticulous documentary Florence Foster Jenkins: A World of Her Own (2008).
French actress Catherine Frot plays Marguerite as an enigma, which is poetic. Frot (the T is silent) has a full-moon face, with great round cheekbones and lips reminiscent of Lillian Gish. She is not conventionally beautiful, neither is she plain. Something perfectly unworldly lights her features. Frot acts in this film chiefly with her eyes, which register not only emotion but such subtle shadings as a bewilderment that dare not speak its name. We can glimpse inside her sensitive regard a swirling tide pool of inchoate impressions and impulses vying for a grasp on reality that never comes.
Marguerite is surrounded by men, who seem to be gay, maybe because they surround her, but in some cases turn out not to be, at least for narrative purposes. Her chief enabler is not her husband, who hates her musical pretensions, has a mistress on the side, and makes elaborate excuses involving a temperamental automobile for his inability to sit through the torment of her recitals. A fantastic character called Madelbos serves Madame in the triple capacity of chauffeur, photographer, and accompanist. He is played by Denis Mpunga, a Belgian actor of Congolese descent, with an intensity that recalls Eric von Stroheim's butlering for Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, that masterpiece on the madness of make-believe. Mpunga never smirks.
Marguerite is paralleled by a young woman named Hazel, a singer who has all the gifts the older woman was denied: talent, technique, and naturalness. Hazel has a boyfriend, one of those men I thought was gay, a music critic who's part of a young gang of avant-gardists who sincerely-ironically enjoy Marguerite for her Dada dissonance. My favorite part of the film is Marguerite's brief immersion in the world of experimental performance, singing "La Marseillaise" for an audience of anti-war anarchists. It's a good niche for her. She makes an authentic contribution. Alas, she wants to be taken seriously by classical music snobs.
Director Xavier Giannoli, working from a screenplay co-written with Marcia Romano, is not trying to make us laugh at a woman making a fool of herself. For that, Bravo. Neither does he offer any sentimental psychologisms for Marguerite's outlandish attempts to pass herself off as a diva. Marguerite's singing master, played by Atos Pezzini as equal parts dedicated artist, penniless con man, and compassionate guru, might or might not be responsible for her drift into madness. No matter. Fictional Marguerite, like her factual Manhattan counterpart, followed her dream where it led. As Florence Foster Jenkins said, "Some may say I couldn't sing, but no one can say I didn't sing."