There is nothing particularly special about Falling for Figaro. The characters are warm enough – yes, even the crotchety old lady who reluctantly agrees to coach our heroine in her chosen career path. The story beats are almost, but not entirely, as predictable as we might anticipate in a story like this one. Good things happen to the characters we like, unfortunate things fall apart for the ones we don’t, and the crotchety old lady moves an inch toward maybe almost being possibly kind of a nicer person. While there may not be anything inherently wrong with this approach, co-writer/director Ben Lewin isn’t going out of his way to engage us in it, either.
It is difficult, then, for any of the inevitabilities in the plot to underwhelm or overwhelm or evenly whelm the audience. The film simply starts, continues and comes to exactly the conclusion that we might have foreseen when all the necessary elements were introduced at approximately the proper start of the plot. Millie (Danielle Macdonald) quits her dead-end job as a fund manager and pursues her love of opera by traveling from London, where the young American woman is living with her bemused boyfriend Charlie (Shazad Latif), to the Scottish Highlands. There, she will find Meghan Geoffrey-Bishop (Joanna Lumley), a former opera heavyweight who is now – you guessed it – the crotchety old lady who takes on new students whenever it fancies her.
In other words, she isn’t taking anyone on right now. She’s busy enough with the promising Max (Hugh Skinner), whom she seems to critique with far too much passion, and Millie’s not-very-promising audition doesn’t help things. Meghan barks instructions at her, “tests” her breath level by choking her, and physically holds her tongue aloft to “test” other things. She is an absolute menace of a mentor, but of course, beneath the icy visage is a woman who wishes to reclaim some of her old glory – or, at least, that is what Max guesses and what Meghan vehemently denies.
Millie’s goal is to perform in a big competition for aspiring opera singers, and so much of the plot pits her against Max, with whom she immediately butts heads. Macdonald and Skinner have an easygoing rapport, though Skinner’s performance is otherwise a little too mannered in how aloof the character seems to be at Millie’s talents.
The screenplay by Lewin and Allen Palmer does nicely tie things up in a bow at the end with some developments that are either unanticipated and honest (the outcome of the competition, to name the main one) or entirely anticipated and far too neat (the outcome of the romantic triangle at the movie’s core). Falling for Figaro could easily be a better version of itself by embracing the honest stuff we don’t expect, but that might mean venturing outside of its comfort zone – and we, apparently, can’t have that.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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