The French will be aghast: with climate change, the English are already encroaching on the sparkling wine trade, and now they’ve got the cheek to make biopics about the wine-makers too. Inadvertently or not, this Joe Wright-produced period drama functions as decorous product placement for champagne house Veuve Clicquot. Portraying Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot (Haley Bennett) in her climb from demure young lover to patriarchy-defying innovator who finally rejects remarriage as a means of securing legal autonomy, it owes a debt to Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film Elizabeth.
It’s 1805, and 27-year-old Barbe-Nicole is under the cosh after her husband François (Tom Sturridge), a genius vintner but an unstable soul, kills himself. Her father-in-law Philippe (Ben Miles) doesn’t think she can run the estate, and her neighbours – including the Moët family – are eyeing up the property. But unafraid of getting her hands dirty, she resolves to continue François’ experiments towards perfecting what became the iconic “comet” vintage. With the Clicquot finances in tatters and the Napoleonic wars hampering trade, she devises a clandestine continental sales network with the help of rakish broker Louis Bohne (Control’s Sam Riley).
Director Thomas Napper (who previously helmed the 2017 boxing film Jawbone) works from a delicate script that alternates François’ Byronic, laudanum-fuelled meltdown with Barbe-Nicole’s present-day struggles. It’s convincing in the broad sweeps of fey romance and quasi-feminist advocacy, without quite attaining fine-grained psychological insight. Barbe-Nicole’s line “When they struggle to survive, they become more reliant on their own strength,” is about as piercing as we get (she’s, ahem, talking about the vines).
Similarly, Napper evokes this enchanting demi-monde of vine-whispering and wine-decanting in generally tasteful, diaphanous tones, without ever – unlike his protagonist – hitting on a style of his own. (He does have his moments, though, including a beautiful shot of a naked Barbe-Nicole disappearing in and out of candlelight.) Bennett is a little stiff and bloodless in the lead role until the excellent closing scene, with Sturridge engagingly erratic in flashback, and Riley making a dashing 19th-century equivalent of a Majestic Wine wholesaler. It’s not quite the full grand cru period drama from the Merchant Ivory vintage, but rather a semi-sparkling biopic.