Starring: Joanna Lumley, Danielle Macdonald, Hugh Skinner and Gary Lewis
Distributor: Umbrella Entertainment
Runtime: 105 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This romantic comedy tells of a successful fund manager, working in London, who trains with a fearsome professional singer of the past. She survives the rigours of her training, and becomes a respected opera singer.
This Australian-British film is a romantic comedy about a highly successful funds manager Millie Cantrell (Macdonald). She never became the opera singer she always wanted to be, and sets out determinedly to be one.
To pursue her dreams, Millie ends her relationship with her long-term boyfriend Ramsay(Lewis), taking opera singing lessons from the ‘Mad Diva’, a tyrannical Meghan Geoffrey-Bishop (Lumley), who is a former opera grande dame. Millie wants to fulfil her life-long ambition by winning Britain’s ‘Singer of Renown’ contest, and hires Meghan to help her. She knows that success in that competition will open the door to a contract with a major opera company, and she turns down a lucrative promotion as a fund manager in London to pursue her dream.
Filmed around Glasgow, and other Scottish surrounds, the story unfolds in the picturesque Scottish village of Drumbuchan, Megan’s home town. The movie charms with the arias of well-known operas across a range of different composers. The musical soundtrack contains arias from: The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro (which gives the film its title), Don Giovanni, Romeo and Juliet, La Traviata, and Carmen, and features the music of Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, Donizetti, Pergolesi, Gounod, and other well-known composers. The film is an enjoyable romp through opera, directed by Australian Ben Lewin. The film perhaps won’t be to the liking of die-hard opera fans who have the music of Wagner very much in mind, but one is entertained by good singing of much-loved, popular arias.
In Scotland, Millie undergoes ruthless vocal training with Meghan, and she experiences strong operatic rivalry. The plot is predictable, but Lumley attacks her role as the Mad Diva with malicious enthusiasm. Meghan prepares two students, Max Thistlewaite (Skinner) and Millie for the same competition, and she manipulates their love-lives to get the best performance out of them. The film’s drama is outranked by the charm of the movie, which is directed to please. Not surprisingly, Millie succeeds in becoming an opera singer, and romantically with Max, who is attempting ‘Singer of Renown’ for the fourth time, after having been runner-up three times. Max is Millie’s operatic rival, and he tries to win the competition with an aria he has chosen from The Marriage of Figaro.
The operatic arias in the movie are well staged, and Australian artists sing on the movie’s soundtrack. Lumley delivers her lines with deadpan accuracy and she motivates Millie and Max with all the coarseness and insults that she can muster. The singing is excellent. The romantic attraction of Millie and Max to each other plays out in the duets they sing together, as well as what happens to them in real-life.
This an entertaining, gently inspiring film, for the not-too-serious opera lover – one who enjoys the lyrical splendour of good operatic music sung well. Macdonald is well suited to the title role of Millie, and has a good sense of what turns a good dramatic moment into comedy. But Lumley dominates the film dramatically by viciously pushing Millie and Max to realise their professional ambitions. She acerbically refers to their singing as ‘noise pollution’ to push them both to sing better, for example, which, of course, they do.
This is an escapist film for opera lovers that has been directed in spirited fashion to charm. The music and singing are delightful, and the film impressively entertains.
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