In Albert and David Maysles’ documentary, Grey Gardens, Little Edie Beale in a melancholy aside confides to the camera, “It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. Do you know what I mean? Awfully difficult.” The Beales, mother and daughter, didn’t keep that line. While their East Hampton manse rotted, the past consumed them in a vortex of passivity and psychological decay.
The past and the present also fuse together in Thomas Napper’s Widow Clicquot. Filmed in somber tones and autumnal hues, the director, with editor Richard Marizy, moves deftly back and forth in time. But Barbe Nicole Clicquot’s (Haley Bennett) memories of her late husband François (Tom Sturridge) don’t paralyze her. After his unexpected death, she inherits the Clicquot family vineyards and sets out to save the imperiled estate by implementing new approaches to viticulture.
An epilogue confirms that, at the turn of the 19th century, the titular widow revolutionized the craft of making champagne. The Veuve Clicquot brand still sparkles at dinner tables two centuries later. And while a sequence shows Barbe stewing and brewing up new vintages in flasks and beakers—Madame Curie as an oenophile—that final on-screen note means to compensate for a gap in the narrative. According to the Veuve Clicquot website, Madame Clicquot’s innovations led to “the first known vintage champagne; the invention of the riddling table; the first known blended rosé champagne.”
Widow Clicquot glides over these didactic details. The screenplay, by Erin Dignam, invents lyrical and melodramatic sketches of the truncated life the Clicquots shared as a couple. In recounting their intimacies, the audience begins to see what sustained and inspired Barbe in the years following François’ death.
As newlyweds scantily clad in bed, they describe the wine they’re drinking to each other. Barbe begins the exchange, “Floral. Like our rose garden. In June, after a rain shower. And burning leaves and twigs …” François completes her thought with the words, “And the apple orchard when the trees are at their tallest.” This flirtatious exchange ends in laughter. The Clicquots delighted in each other’s minds and imaginations as well as their bodies.
On another occasion, Barbe encounters François while he caresses and sings to the planted grape vines. Reluctantly, she joins him in song. Enraptured, he sinks happily down to the ground, indifferent to the mud that dirties his clothing and skin. Their marriage was also an apprenticeship, with him a hands-on teacher divulging the secrets of his trade and she a willing, adept pupil.
These summery scenes filled with billowing white curtains and shimmering sunlight are juxtaposed with scenes suffused in darkness. A severe black dress and veil that wholly swallow her up replace Barbe’s white negligee. Her long braids of hair reappear coiled and wound up tightly around the top of her head. François, once naked in bed, now lies unclothed on a cold mortuary table in preparation for his burial.
Without spelling out his particular brand of madness, the doomed François appears to have struggled with both addiction and depression. Widow Clicquot is initially framed as a great cinematic love story, un amour fou, until François’ instability upends the marriage. After his death, she faces the future with a resolute sense of practicality. Barbe revisits the past, but isn’t haunted by the memory of her husband. A haunting implies a feeling of stasis caused by an assertive ectoplasm that forces the living to stay fixed in place. She emerges from the wreckage of her marriage not embittered but emboldened.
Bennett appears on-screen in every scene of the movie. Widow Clicquot isn’t her first starring role, but it provides her with an opportunity to carry a feature film in which a solitary woman dismantles the patriarchy. In the same way that Florence Pugh and Anya Taylor-Joy destroyed their male rivals in Lady Macbeth and The Witch, respectively. As Barbe, Bennett’s voice is maternal, conciliatory and also unwavering. All of the character’s defiance resides in her eyes and posture. She stands still with a perfectly straight back, closing her eyes ever so slightly before glowering with the same degree of ferocity that Charlotte Rampling so easily summons up.
‘Widow Clicquot’ is now playing at the Orinda Theatre and is available to stream.
