“Falling for Figaro” (M) **** and a half

FOR the first three or four minutes of writer/director Ben Lewin’s musical comedy, it looked as if what followed would be a predictable outcome. 

Aspiring soprano Millie would sing grand opera and walk off stage to thunderous applause, a multitude of curtains and a happy ever after with the handsome baritone.

Fortunately, those portents were mistaken. Millie quits a well-paid job in a London financial management firm and travels to Scotland to try out with retired singer Meghan Geoffrey-Bishop whose reputation as a teacher is wrapped in barbed wire. Millie has much to learn and here’s a film that shows her doing it

As Millie, buxom, bigly built, the role imposes no great burden for sweetly-featured Danielle Macdonald (no relative, I suspect, but she’s certainly Australian). When the script calls for Millie to warble an aria or two, Australian-Mauritian opera singer Stacey Alleaume is standing by to dub the sound. 

Playing the acerbic Meghan is a doddle for Joanna Lumley, mostly wearing what looks for the most part like hand-me-downs and straggly blonde hair that shrieks for a coiffeur to come and fix it. 

Needing a student who can support her in the style she might have enjoyed earlier in her performing career, Meghan rather fancies Jack-of-many-trades Max (Hugh Skinner, voiced by Nathan Lay when singing), a handy baritone who for several years in the Singer Of Renown competition has been runner-up.

At birth we are all issued with a musical instrument called a voice. I sorrow for those of us whose adult voices sound less than pleasant. When it comes to opera, anything more serious than “Yeomen of the Guard” stops me. “Falling for Figaro” offers a goodly sprinkle of operatic snippets sung well. Pity they’re so often not in English!

“Falling for Figaro” may have been shot in Scotland where the rural landscape looks so lovely and the people are so delightful. But hang about for the closing credits. It’s an Australian production.

At all Canberra cinemas