This text was first published in November 2016 when the film hit theaters. It will now run on Arte on Sunday, July 18 at 8:15 p.m., which is why we are republishing the review.
These wrinkles. The camera loves it, Hugh Grant adores it, Meryl Streep lives it. And the viewer, who is usually never allowed to see the folds of the screen heroes up close, soon falls in love with these folds, then with Hugh Grant’s unsuccessfully poor stage actor and finally and immortally with Meryl Streep’s weird New York society singer-diva Florence Foster Jenkins.
This Florence Foster Jenkins, who, thanks to an inheritance, was able to fully live her passion for music, is a legend. Anyone who wants to finally bring a party to its climax just has to put on a record by this absolutely unique singer.
Your classic is Mozart’s revenge aria of the Queen of the Night. How Jenkins ends up consistently and easily recognizable even for the hard of hearing below the desired top grade and then clings to the unavoidably wrong tone, how she relentlessly strangles the tempo, how she only reaches the top with a dry shadow of her deeply voluminous voice: All that is not a bit off, but ingeniously wrong.
For this reason, the reactions of uninitiated listeners are the same as those of connoisseurs. Incredulous amazement turns into unrestrained laughter and then gives way to even more incredulous amazement.
If Florence Foster Jenkins was just a bad singer, no one would remember this woman. Then three films closely based on Jenkins’ biography would not have hit theaters within a year.
A human myth like Faust, Don Giovanni or Don Quixote
Stephen Frears’ “Florence Foster Jenkins”, which is overwhelming not least because of Meryl Streep, starts on Thursday. Ralf Pflegeer’s rather dull “The Florence Foster Jenkins Story” premiered two weeks ago. Xavier Giannolis finally transferred the material for his film “Madame Marguerite” congenially from America to Paris and from the forties to the twenties. His film came out in the spring and can be seen on DVD (Concorde).
The reason for the interest is easy to see, but difficult to pinpoint. Jenkins’ failure apparently touches her audience in the deepest regions of their psyche. That shows her as one of the great original geniuses, as a human myth like Faust, Don Giovanni or Don Quixote. This is exactly what Stephen Frears and Xavier Giannoli claim in their overwhelming films.
Above all, they both understood that this subject can only be mastered with an actress who can do everything, who does not shy away from exposure and who, above all, sings herself, which is why these films are only really fun in the original version.
Catherine Frot and Meryl Streep are divine ideal casts. Both listened deeply to Jenkins’ recordings. They imitate their role model not slavishly, but in the central moments.