FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS

The story of terrible opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins is such a good one, you wonder why it has never been told on screen before. Now, with the strange synchronicity peculiar only to cinema and London buses, two movie versions about the wealthy Manhattan prima donna come along at once.

Xavier Giannoli’s fictionalised and stylised account in Marguerite has been charming French and British audiences for a while now, earning actress Catherine Frot a deserved César in the process.

Now comes Stephen Frears’s more faithful telling, set in New York in 1944, although shot in the UK with Liverpool standing in seamlessly for wartime Manhattan, and populated by British character actors including John Sessions and David Haigh, all buzzing around the Queen Bee of Meryl Streep in the title role.

Both films about the socialite singer approach their subject with such affection and imagination that they transcend biography. While Marguerite plays with her delusion and its descent into operatic tragedy, Frears’s film tiptoes more daintily into farce and poignant comedy.

Streep’s first entrance is in a hilarious amateurish revue for her upscale Verdi Club, where she is lowered on a rope, playing an angelic muse of inspiration. Florence is energetically supported in her tone-deaf musical endeavours by her husband, failed Shakespearean actor St Clair Bayfield, played with vigour by Hugh Grant. His role might not be much of a stretch in his limited range, but Grant is charming and his timing zings, giving elegant life to such phrases in Nicholas Martin’s script as: ‘I doubt even Mrs O’Flaherty can slurp a trout.’

Ms Foster Jenkins’s eccentricities become the source of mirth, such as a collection of chairs ‘in which notable people have expired’, and her whimsical hiring of pianist Cosme McMoon, played with a fey simper by Simon Helberg. While Helberg’s performance strikes a weak note, Grant ushers in the changes of tone with beaming, rictus reactions while he throws a protective ring around his ‘Bunny’. The fact that there appears to be genuine love here is what gives the film its emotional core, even while St Clair is shacked up in an apartment (paid for by Florence) with his bohemian mistress Kathleen, played by the beguiling Rebecca Ferguson.

And then we come to Streep. Again, she delivers an imperious performance, incorporating comedy, tragedy, musicality and tenderness. Her hilarious trills sound like a puppy playing with one of those squeaky toy bones and we can’t help our chuckles, aided by Streep’s blend of old-school mugging and delicate fragility. We laugh, certainly, but feel guilty about it, and that’s Streep’s genius. She becomes such a real person on screen that, as an audience, we feel we have to behave honestly in front of her. Aided by Consolata Boyle’s faithful costumes, we get a real feel for the self-created world the rich Manhattanite is capable of weaving around herself in the service of her dreams.

And, to a certain extent, these are fulfilled in the climactic concert at Carnegie Hall, an event that in Frears’s hands becomes a torrent of conflicting emotions, from hilarious to tragically miscued. In this age of blockbusters and superhero face-off mayhem, the masterful simplicity of Frears’s direction reminds us that unfussiness is a great virtue.

Meanwhile, Grant’s Bayfield makes it his duty to keep the ‘mockers and scoffers’ at bay, going to extraordinary lengths to fill the audience with admirers and bribe leading newspaper reviewers. They needn’t have worried about poor deluded Madame Florence getting bad press this time – this is a fine, funny and heartfelt tribute to the misguided passions of its titular heroine, a woman admirably committed to living out her dreams at any cost.