Marguerite, played by Ella Rumpf, is a frigid and antisocial PhD student who has spent years trying to prove the Goldbach theorem, which has eluded her and her peers. She behaves almost like a mathematical version of Sherlock Holmes, as her every effort is spent on her research, and her ego prevents her from making emotional connections or caring about the people around her. At the beginning of the film she presents her research to a lecture hall full of students, and one of them points out a flaw that disproves and invalidates the entirety of her thesis, fuelling her downward spiral into a mental breakdown.
The plot often falls into cliché, with a familiar storyline that follows the continuous struggle and eventual breakthrough of someone who wants to make their mark on the world. The film needed a more compelling protagonist to make this oft-told arc worthwhile. Marguerite is fundamentally dislikeable. She ruins her relationship with everyone in the film at some point or another, and it’s a minor miracle that any of them accept her long list of flaws.
For example, while her roommate Noa, played by Sonia Bonny, is away, she paints every wall in their apartment black, so that she can use it as a blackboard to scribble her equations on. She then runs out of space — clearly having never heard of an eraser or the good old-fashioned notebook — and resorts to using any space, including tables and windows. She doesn’t even apologise to her roommate when she comes back to find that her bedroom has been painted black to serve Marguerite’s ambition. Instead, Marguerite continues to scribble on the wall and says “Sorry, I’m onto something really important.”
Another instance of Marguerite’s toxic behaviour is her attitude toward her colleague and later boyfriend Lucas (Julien Frison). After a failed presentation she slaps Lucas on the face — despite him having no responsibility or involvement in her work — and later she approaches him again when she wants to use him to present her work. Despite trying her hardest to isolate herself and prevent people from getting close to her, Lucas is able to worm his way into her heart by being a decent person and manages to make her slightly less emotionally constipated. However, when Marguerite later realises that their work has a crucial error which disproves it, she immediately reacts by breaking up with him and forcing him out of the apartment, where he had been virtually living with her to work together on the theorem.
With such an unpleasant protagonist, it was difficult to enjoy watching her succeed, or even to masochistically appreciate her struggle, as every time something bad happened to Marguerite she would take it out on the people around her, who were generally just trying to help. Perhaps the director, Anna Novion, wanted to prove that women can be arseholes too: it feels like the film has been framed as a story about girl power when it should be about acknowledging Marguerite’s hubris. Her supervisor, Laurent Werner (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is halfheartedly typecast as the unremarkable white man whose sole purpose is to hinder her progress and sigh in disapproval when she doesn’t fulfil her potential. Darroussin lacked personality as Werner did and did not relieve the film of its already tense tone.
However, Sonia Bonny performed excellently in playing Noa, who was a freelance dancer and Marguerite’s chaotic best friend. Her vivacity and enthusiasm lent some much-needed liveliness. Meanwhile, Clotilde Coreau as Suzanne, Marguerite’s mother, likewise felt like a voice of reason, particularly when Marguerite picked up the habit of betting on mahjong and using the illegal winnings as her main source of income. When Marguerite has another breakdown after her equations go wrong and she loses a game for the first time, she spirals in a way that begins to feel predictable and flat.
Marguerite’s Theorem has clear ambitions: it wants to be a feminist film about a strong, brilliant young woman who pursues her dreams and changes the world. However, it feels more like a film about a miserable egomaniac, whose obsessive and irreverent view of the world blinds her to the goodness in other people. At the end of the film when she finally succeeds in proving Goldbach’s theorem — and conveniently gets her boyfriend back, through little effort of her own — her success feels stale because her character development has been barely realised. Perhaps the wall of numbers could speak for its own triumph — but alas, for we mere mortals, numbers cannot speak.
Marguerite’s Theorem (2023) played at the 2024 Alliance Française French Film Festival.
