Watching the lead actress in a little film called Falling For Figaro I struggled to remember where I’d seen her before.
Australian Danielle Macdonald was terrific in I Am Woman as a rock journalist, as Madeleine the Medium in French Exit, and particularly as a cop in an American TV thriller called Unbelievable.
Photo: Screenshot
She was completely different in all of them, but frankly, nobody’s idea of a movie star – particularly a would-be star opera singer, which she plays in Falling for Figaro.
Millie ditches a successful career as a bank fund manager to become a serious singer, which you’d think would be a big ask.
But you don’t become a fund manager without a good eye for a short cut, and the short cut to fame and fortune, as we all know, is to win a TV talent quest. For that, you’ll need a genius vocal trainer.
Megan – Joanna Lumley – is, of course in a movie like this, the ‘Vocal Coach From Hell’. She’s about to toss Millie out on her ear, until Millie reveals she has a wad of fund manager funds in her back pocket and is prepared to pay well over the odds for a year’s tuition.
Megan grudgingly agrees. But now we need to introduce a complication.
We’ve met Millie’s suave, wealthy boyfriend, waiting for her in London. Now enter Megan’s other pupil - poor but worthy Max.
Max is played by Hugh Skinner, another “I know the face” actor who you may remember from TV shows Fleabag and The Windsors – he’s very funny in both.
Can he take a romantic lead, particularly as a convincing baritone, we wonder?
Falling for Figaro was written and directed by veteran Australian Ben Lewin, whose last film of note was an unlikely winner – the sex-surrogate comedy-drama The Sessions.
I’m not sure Falling for Figaro quite matches that film. Apart from anything, Millie and Max look such unlikely inheritors of the mantles of Dame Kiri and Pavarotti that our disbelief isn’t so much suspended as flapping in the breeze.
But the script is smarter than it first appears. Yes, it’s about following your dream – even one as unlikely as winning an opera competition after just one year of tuition.
The point is that a prize you can bluff your way to get is hardly worth winning, you’d think. It’s not like boxing where you can win with one lucky punch.
The contest on screen is presumably echoed off it too. Are good performances enough to take Danielle Macdonald and Hugh Skinner to the next level?
If you want to know what that means, take a look at your co-star. Lumley, as always, dominates the screen without breaking a sweat.
