This muddled film, based on a true story, chronicles the origins of the French champagne house Veuve Clicquot.
In the age of fizzy corporate biopics, “Widow Clicquot” — which chronicles the origins of the French champagne house Veuve Clicquot — has a couple of things going for it. Set in the 1800s around the Napoleonic Wars, the film, based on a true story, is boosted by the historical sweep and feminist credentials.
Directed by Thomas Napper, it’s got all the trappings of a swoony epic à la the 2005 “Pride & Prejudice” (Joe Wright, that film’s director, is a producer on “Widow Clicquot”). But ambitious as it is in scope, the film is also somewhat charmless and dour, caught between wanting to deliver the passion audiences expect from a period romance and constructing a suspenseful underdog tale. It’s too bad it never finds a winning balance.
Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot (Haley Bennett) is 26 when her husband, François (Tom Sturridge), the heir to a champagne business, dies. There are two timelines: One shows Barbe-Nicole, now considered one of the world’s first modern businesswomen, fending off her male skeptics as she takes command of the vineyard. Force majeure (wartime embargoes; spoiled shipments of bubbly) ruins her finances, but Barbe-Nicole perseveres, eventually creating an in-demand vintage and inventing a new process (the riddling table) that speeds up production.
The second thread looks back to Barbe-Nicole’s marriage with François and his gradual descent into madness, which was exacerbated by his addiction to opium. The cinematographer Caroline Champetier (“Annette”) captures the lovebirds in warm, luminous colors, providing a sharp contrast with the gloomy interiors of the wartime narrative.
Placing François at the emotional center of Barbe-Nicole’s mission, however, feels awkward and disingenuous, and the back-and-forth nature of the film kills the momentum. The brooding score, by Bryce Dessner, tells us that we’re in the realm of big drama, though I wish the film itself generated enough feelings to match.
Widow Clicquot
Rated R. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
