WIDOW CLICQUOT - Mark Reviews Movies

Widow Clicquot, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 18, 2024

If not for some text at the end of Widow Clicquot, there'd be little awareness of how vital the title character was to the world of wine. Here's a movie that has to tell us how important its protagonist was, because the story itself is so concerned with everything and everyone else surrounding her accomplishments.

It's a strange approach on the part of screenwriter Erin Dignam (adapting a non-fiction book by Tilar J. Mazzeo), especially when the movie's climax revolves around a defiant statement of independence on the part of that character. She's Barbe-Nicole Clicquot (Haley Bennett), the wife of an experimental winemaker in the Champagne region of France who becomes a widow within the first few minutes of director Thomas Napper's movie.

The husband may seem to be out of the picture with his untimely death, leaving the widow in control of a struggling business and with ambitions to make a new kind of sparkling wine. The narrative's reliance on flashbacks to tell a love story, though, means that he's not and that story never fully belongs to its eponymous protagonist. It contradicts everything the movie wants us to take away from and cheer on by its conclusion.

Set at the turn of the 19th century, the story constantly switches between Madame Clicquot's attempts to save her dead husband's business in the present tense and, in the past, the evolution of her marriage to François (Tom Sturridge). The emotional weight of the tale belongs to those flashbacks, as the couple enjoy a seemingly happy life in bed and in the vineyards, where Madame Clicquot presumably learns everything there is to know about the growing of grapes and their fermentation from her husband's metaphorical musings about wine. As that part of the narrative progresses, however, François begins to show signs of unhealthy obsession, to have unpredictable mood swings, and to put his entire existence behind the vineyard's success or, as it goes, failure.

We come to know more about François, in other words, than his wife in this section, since she's only there to be supportive of and worry about her husband. So much of the momentum of the story depends on his gradual downfall, in fact, that it carries over to the section depicting Madame Clicquot's running of the business. The very little we understand about the Clicquots' revolutionary method of making Champagne, for example, comes almost exclusively from scenes of François explaining and experimenting with it.

It's not that knowledge of making this wine should be necessary or would be beneficial to this story, but it is that the way this story is assembled intrinsically removes Madame Clicquot from the process. What does that leave her to do in her own narrative?

In this case, it's to debate and negotiate with assorted men who so skeptical of her ability to run the business—or, more generally, women being involved in business at all—that there's also little room for her to be an independent figure. Her father-in-law Phillipe (Ben Miles), for example, wants to sell the vineyards almost immediately after his son's burial, despite François' explicit instructions that his wife should take over the enterprise. She argues with the vineyard's managers about rearranging the layout of the grapevines, the type of glass to use for bottles, and her philosophy of management, which imagines everyone sitting at a table to discuss matters instead of a strict hierarchy.

Admirably, Bennett is quite good here, providing Madame Clicquot the spark of autonomy that, for the most part, the movie seems to go out of its way to deny her. That's especially true of how much time is devoted to her in abject grief over François' death and uncertainty about him when he's alive in the flashbacks.

Even the character's best and most rebellious ideas (such as breaking Napoleon Bonaparte's trade embargoes with Russia), rely on wine distributor Louis Bohne (Sam Riley) for basic affirmation and to make them work. Louis, a libertine in private matters and cunning in those of business, was a close friend—and, as it's suggested, more—to François. The only thing that could make the relationship between Madame Clicquot and Louis more undermining for her character would be the development of a romance for the two, and at this point, does one really need to ask if that happens here?

Madame Clicquot doesn't examine the history surrounding its story, the process of winemaking, or the inspired business tactics that would mean the main character's name is still associated with Champagne. Worse, though, it never gives us a sense of the woman amidst and behind that history, except in terms of her relationships to men and the hint that her story is just beginning at the movie's end.

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