Mark Reviews Movies: FALLING FOR FIGARO

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 30, 2021

Director Ben Lewin and Allen Palmer's screenplay for Falling for Figaro settles for a series of predictable setups and expected clichés. It's a story about letting go of comfort and security in order to pursue a dream. It's a will-they-or-won't-they romantic comedy, about two seemingly mismatched people who might be perfect for each other. The story features a few eccentric side players, who exist to provide laughs for the audience and some support for the main characters, and the climax revolves around a competition in which our protagonists' destinies will be determined.

There's nothing new or unique here, in other words, but that never has mattered, really, when it comes to a story's effectiveness. As long as there's something for us to latch on to in a story, whether that be a character or a relationship or a sense of humor or a tone or anything else, the story is almost irrelevant. It's how that story is told and the individual components within it that actually matter.

Lewin and Palmer don't give us much in terms of those specific elements or that broader sense of a story told well. The movie has its simple, straightforward, and easily accessible goals, and it's not going to let anything like worthwhile characters, an actually romantic romance, comedy, or the like get in the way of accomplishing those aims. It knows what it wants to do, which is admirable. The movie doesn't particularly care how it's going to do that, which isn't.

The story begins with Millie (Danielle Macdonald), a successful fund manager in London who has been a longtime fan of the opera. She's dating and living with Charlie (Shazad Latif), who is also her boss and doesn't care about opera (She has to nudge him awake when they're at a performance). Millie has had a secret dream for a long time, and the event of being offered a promotion at work is the moment she finally decides to pursue it. She wants to become an opera singer.

Millie, who apparently has no singing experience except in the shower, does at least have a plan. A forthcoming singing competition awards the winner with a position at a renowned opera troupe. If she can train her voice in time for the contest, Millie could fast-track her way to achieving her dream.

That's the first of a few unsurprising ideas in this story, which is made up almost exclusively of them. The next is Millie's choice of teacher, one Meghan Geoffrey-Bishop (Joanna Lumley), a once-famous opera singer, who now lives on a farm in the Scottish Highlands and has an attitude to match her gloomy, isolated surroundings (The little town, where everyone knows each other's business because there really isn't much at all to the place, is another, if smaller, of those obvious notions). Meghan doesn't want to take on another student, until Millie offers to pay her more than she'd usually earn, so the cynical, bad-tempered teacher accepts.

If the screenplay is made up of a bunch of familiar ideas crammed together, it's also rather impatient in allowing any of those elements develop or expand. Here, for example, seems to be one setup, in which Millie will take Meghan's bad attitude and abuse, while the teacher gradually comes to accept and even admire her new student. That happens, although almost entirely in the background or off-screen, because the next part of the story—before it changes gears again to become about getting ready for the competition and the contest itself—involves the rivalry-turned-romance between Millie and Meghan's only other student.

He's Max (Hugh Skinner), who has been training for and losing that singing competition for five years. Max resents Millie at first, sabotaging her audition by loudly working on the plumbing, and becomes jealous of her talent. Clearly, these two very different personalities and this one-sided enmity will have to turn into something else.

That it's a friendship with a level of professional respect is one possibility. That it's actually a sudden romance, with little development beyond some generic conversations and a single practice for a duet, is the more obvious and anticipated, as well as the less believable and fulfilling, conclusion. That Lewin and Palmer drop Millie's tenuous relationship with Meghan, Max's strange bond with the teacher, the existence of Meghan as a factor in this story almost entirely, and anything else that might interrupt this unconvincing romance shows the rush the screenwriters are in to hit every narrative point they've calculated.

To be fair, Macdonald and Skinner are charming enough, even if their characters seem to move at the whims of the story, and it's not as if the story itself is necessarily a terrible one. Falling for Figaro simply plays it all terribly safe, hoping to make us comfortable in knowing every move it'll make, and with a minimal sense of what it wants to do beyond getting through its story.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products