A César award-winning performance by Catherine Frot as the tone-deaf Marguerite Dumont drives a tragicomic tale of a wealthy but lonely music lover who proves that “singers can’t hear themselves”. Inspired by the real-life figure of Florence Foster Jenkins (also the subject of Stephen Frears’s forthcoming film starring Meryl Streep), this engagingly compassionate fable from writer-director Xavier Giannoli (The Singer, Superstar) opens at a private party in September 1920, where wannabe opera star Marguerite scares children under tables with a voice that is “divinely off-key – sublimely, wildly!” Cold-shouldered by a husband who sees her as “a freak”, Marguerite is embraced by opportunists and anarchists who hear in her voice the sound of someone trying to “exorcise an inner demon” – a review she takes as a compliment. An elaborate conspiracy to protect Marguerite from the reality of her situation results in a series of rehearsals for a grand public performance involving a deaf pianist, a bearded-lady soothsayer, and a blackmailed singing tutor, but Giannoli and Frot ensure that Marguerite is never the butt of the joke. On the contrary, she embodies something admirably unruly – a devotion to music that transcends the stifling disappointments of real life. Denis Mpunga is excellent as butler/accompanist Madelbos, whose photographic record of Marguerite’s odyssey adds a Greenaway-esque touch (Michael Nyman’s Chasing Sheep makes a significant appearance) and André Marcon convinces as the husband whose aloof detachment fires his unloved wife’s true passion.
