Florence Foster Jenkins, 02/05/2016

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.

"Marguerite", 03/10/2015

I understand there's a film biopic of the inimitable Florence Foster Jenkins in the works, with none other than Meryl Streep in the title role.  In the meantime, French director Xavier Giannoli has snuck in there with a film loosely inspired by the would-be diva, which opened last week and which I found the time to see before returning to the UK.  Set in 1920, the unfortunate tone-deaf prima donna is a wealthy French philanthropist, Marguerite Dumont, and in the course of the film she "graduates" from a (thankfully) brief appearance at a private benefit concert to preparing for and appearing at a full-scale public recital, formal concert hall and the works.

There are, as you might expect, a few laugh-out loud moments.  The singing of Dumont (of which, thankfully, there's not actually a great deal) is suitably atrocious, and the moment when a formerly distinguished tenor, approached to coach the lady for her public debut, first hears her, is absolutely priceless. But there's much less blatant comedy than might be supposed, instead it's mostly a study of characters - most of whom leave something to be desired.  

Giannoli's film also takes a turn for the melodramatic at the end, which I thought a pity, but it has left me with one persistant thought.  Is it truly possible to appreciate something without understanding it in the least?  And, vice versa, is it possible to completely understand something without learning to appreciate it?  I don't want to use the term "love" in this context, one wanders too easily into stalker territory there - they think they both understand and appreciate the subject of their obsession, when in fact they do neither - and I can't equate Marguerite's devotion to her "art" with that degree of delusion, because she does, in fact, appear to have some understanding of music.  If that is so, however, how is it possible she cannot hear her own vocal defects?  Perhaps Stephen Frears's study of the original FFJ will provide some answers that Giannoli did not.

[Next : No change, 11th October]