The fine French drama Marguerite fictionalizes the life of American socialite Florence Foster Jenkins, whose vocal performances of classical arias, beginning in private music clubs and culminating in a 1944 recital at Carnegie Hall, have earned her a large and respectful entry in the encyclopedia of bad. “She clucked and squawked, trumpeted and quavered,” reports a 1957 story in Coronet magazine. “She couldn’t carry a tune. Her sense of rhythm was uncertain. In the treacherous upper registers, her voice often vanished into thin air.” Published accounts of Jenkins’s life are relatively short, and all seem to be cut from the same cloth, which has helped turn her story into popular myth. Her dubious career has already inspired five plays, and later this spring Paramount Pictures will release Stephen Frears’s Florence Foster Jenkins, starring Meryl Streep. In a world obsessed with amateur singing competitions that can end in triumph or humiliation, Jenkins is an artist whose time has come.
That opinion would surely devastate Marguerite, but there are almost as many perceptions of her as there are characters. The aforementioned charity gala, staged as a sweeping narrative set piece a la The Leopard or The Godfather, brings together Hazel Klein (Christa Théret), a lovely and gifted young soprano engaged by the baroness to perform as part of the program, and Lucien Beaumont (Sylvain Dieuaide), a vicious young music critic who infiltrates the event hoping finally to hear this talked-about noblewoman. Riding home from the event with the monocle-sporting poet and anarchist named Kyril Von Priest (Aubert Fenoy), they debate whether their hostess can hear herself. Lucien argues that no singer can, though Hazel knows from her own experience that good ones listen to themselves. She sees in Marguerite the sort of genuine emotion that powers a great artist, though Lucien considers the baroness a fraud. His subsequent review is a tongue-in-cheek affair reporting that Marguerite “seemed to be trying to exorcise an inner demon,” her voice betraying “a human truth that rends the heart.”
Marguerite is more sensitive than Jenkins was, and the movie’s suspense is predicated on the worry that she’ll break like a china teacup when she learns the truth. Late in the story, Georges commits Marguerite to a sanitarium, and her psychiatrist, hoping to snap her back into reality, records her singing so that she can listen to herself on a phonograph. Hazel, Lucien, Pezzini, and his staff—all of whom have grown fond of Marguerite—provide a little audience as the doctor seats her before the sound horn and Madelbos sets up his camera to capture the moment of truth. Many people are shocked and discomfited when hearing their own voice played back to them—perhaps because, when we speak, we focus almost entirely on meaning, not sound. The question for Marguerite is whether, in finally hearing what others hear, she will become fully herself, or no one at all. v
Directed by Xavier Giannoli
