Widow Clicquot
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes
Stars: Haley Bennett, Tom Sturridge, Sam Riley
Writers: Erin Dignam, Christopher Monger (Based on Tilar J. Mazzeo’s book)
Director: Thomas Napper
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
François Clicquot and his wife Barbe-Nicole were a perfectly matched pair.
He was a visionary early 19th century innovator in the making of French champagne, but also a manic wrecking ball of a man. She was his liaison to the field workers, his private and public champion, and the soothing voice in his ear whenever darkness swallowed his psyche.
But as Widow Clicquot opens (the title gives this away), François is dead. His wife, his young daughter, his father, the vineyard staff, and the entire Champagne region of France are in mourning — and fretting over what will happen next.
As it turns out, quite a bit happens next in this brisk, lavishly filmed true story of love, war, jealousy, corporate greed, and world-class wine snobbery. That’s a lot of notes for one bottle of wine, and, indeed, the vintage would be a tad astringent if not for the full-bodied performance of Haley Bennett in the title role.
The circumstances of François’ passing — as well as the story of the pair’s passionate courtship — unfold slowly via flashbacks, emerging episodically with all the calm circumspection of a skilled vintner. In the meantime, with François gone, Barbe is left to put her late husband’s revolutionary fermentation and bottling processes to the test, battling grief, sexist competitors, advancing Russian troops, Napoleonic embargoes, and the forces of Nature itself.
Virtually her only ally in the endeavor is a wine merchant named Louis Bohne, whose initial bemusement at this woman’s audacity gives way to respect, then collaboration…and finally red-hot romance.
Haley Bennett — who we last saw as the irresistible Roxanne in Peter Dinklage’s Cyrano — is effervescent in the title role; enigmatic and radiant, she seems to have emerged from a painting of the Barbizon School. She brings a smoldering fire to the woman who, while treading gingerly in the realm of men, will nevertheless crush any opposition in her path.
The male actors in the film — and there is a constellation of them — largely orbit Bennett; like their characters, they serve mostly to adorn the woman at their center. As the two men she loves, Sam Riley (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) cranks up his Hugh Jackman charm as the wine merchant Bohne, while Tom Sturridge paints François as a dark-eyed mad scientist whose devotion to all things wine is exceeded only by his only-the-French-can-love-this-much passion for Barbe. Ben Miles (Napoleon) provides Bennett with an imperious foil as François’s grieving yet impatient father, while men in the vineyard and beyond eye her with either undisguised disdain or silent awe.
And then there is the climactic courtroom scene, in which the men of Champagne marshal their legal horses and literally encircle Barbe as they try to pry the winery from her hands.
But Widow Clicquot isn’t all grape vines and greedy garçons. By seeding the film with flashback fragments of the Clicquots’ tragic love story, director Thomas Napper and writers Erin Dignam and Christopher Monger (working from Tilar J. Mazzeo’s best-selling book) infuse even the film’s most wine geeky scenes with humanity. Peering at an unfair world through those wideset almond eyes, pursing her mouth in tight-lipped determination, Bennett’s Barbe may start out trying to fulfill the champagne wishes of her late beloved, but with each pointed flashback, the film illustrates the mounting motivations behind her ultimate oenomania.
Does justice prevail? No spoiler here: Just head down to your nearest high-end liquor store and pick up a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne, still bubblin’ 200 years later.
Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now
