Marguerite (Xavier Giannoli, 2015): France, Czech Republic, Belgium

Reviewed by Hans Patrik Joensson, Santa Barbara, 2016. Arlington Theater.

Everyone who went to the closing night of the Santa Barbara Film Festival knows what a terrible start Marguerite had. With the audience “Boo-ing” at the poorly prepared screening, Marguerite nearly did not even stand a chance of succeeding. However, with a great production and a really good script, Xavier Giannoli did what not many others could do, he turned around an angry crowd with his amazing movie. Much like “The Emperor’s New Groove”, this movie is all about how you fear to telling the ones you love the truth. I did enjoy this movie because I good in some way relate to it. I think everyone knows how hard it is to tell someone close that what they are doing might not be that good. That they might need to change hobbies.

Xavier Giannoli made a great work with both directing and writing this film. The main lead, Catherine Frot gave a believable performance.

The story is about Marguerite, a wealthy lady in the 1920’s. She has a passion for music and especially the opera. Even though she can’t sing at all, she often sing for her friends and family and they always say the same things, how wonderful she sings. One day Marguerite want to take her singing even further and decides to do a show. A show for all the public to see. This is when her husband does everything in his power to stop her show from happening.

I loved the music in the film and how they showed the audience real opera vs Marguerite’s way of singing.

The one film I would say that this was really reminding me of is as I wrote before, “The Emperor’s New Groove”. This was in one way a modern version of that Disney film.

I do think that this movie is worth your time to see. It is a good production with a lot of good actors. The story seems like it could be a true story and it does get you more interested in how it is going to end.