Of course I went to see Stephen Frear's biopic of FFJ, what self-respecting opera lover wouldn't - especially on a bank holiday with nothing better to do! It is worth seeing,very well played and beautifully designed, and, in its way, it's something of a feel-good movie, which you might not expect from the subject. It didn't, however, quite hit the emotional notes of "Marguerite" (although the French film went over-the-top at the end).
There were two things I found interesting about Frear's movie. First was the acting, not so much of Streep, good as she is, but of Simon Hellberg and Hugh Grant. Hellberg was an adorably hapless Cosmé McMoon - rather younger than the real McMoon was at the time - channeling Gene Wilder's Leo Bloom for all his worth. As for Grant, he was exceptional, in a many-layered role that, for me, quite overshadowed Streep's FFJ.
Second was the sense of period. When I first heard FFJ's recordings, I though they dated from a good decade earlier. I've certainly heard recordings from the mid-40s with a much better sound than these Melotone pressings, and it remains, still, a bit of a surprise to realise that they date from the war years. The period is drawn vividly in Frear's film, but there is in it, visually, what I hear in those recordings - a sense of the end of an era. Even if FFJ could have sung correctly, there's a sense that she's a relic that has outlived her time, and you see it echoed all around in the look of the film, in the tiara-ed dowagers set against the hip younger crowd, and the fading splendour of the Art Deco architecture and interiors set against the utilitarian dinginess of more 'modern' flats.
So, two down, one to go.
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