Writer: Lisa Baker
Director: Celyn Jones
On paper, Madfabulous should be the most enjoyable film at this year’s BFI Flare Festival. Telling the true story of the lavishly overdressed 5th Marquis of Anglesey, the film also features a rare performance by Rupert Everett. The music is splendid and the costumes spectacular, but unfortunately, Celyn Jones’s film also feels a little empty and is undone by an ending that is too cosy for its own good. Coming across as a camp version of Downton Abbey, it’s unclear who this movie is aimed at. Never outrageous enough for a queer late-night audience and never traditional enough for lovers of period drama, Madfabulous is as uncomfortably adrift as the Marquis himself.
Callum Scott Howells, moustachioed and wearing a frock, looks fantastic as he arrives by boat at his castle, Plas Newydd, where he is now lord. Much to the horror of his new butler (Everett) and his aunt, his behaviour is decidedly unlordly. They agree that the Marquis should receive an education in decorum.
However, this is not a Pygmalion tale as the Marquis (real name Henry Cyril Paget, nicknamed Toppy by his female cousin, and known to history as the Dancing Marquis) refuses to be taken in hand. He continues to wear dresses, hold spectacular parties and turns the chapel of Plas Newydd into a theatre where he performs his pièce de résistance, the Butterfly Dance.
His outfits always look marvellous, with costume designer Francisco Rodriguez-Weil drawing inspiration from photographs of the Marquis that still exist to this day. Toppy wanted to be famous across the world, and this film would surely give him satisfaction. And yet we learn little about him on a personal level. In flashbacks, we see him with his mother, his legitimacy to nobility questioned as he is the bastard son of his father, who, even when he finally accepts him as his next-in-line, refuses to meet him.
To cross-dress so publicly at a time when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in Reading Gaol was dangerous, but perhaps his island home gave him some protection from the Labouchere Amendment of 1885. To his father’s family, living with the Marquis in the stately pile, the most worrying aspect of his decadence was the money he spent. It’s thought by the National Trust, which now looks after Plas Newydd, that in today’s money, he was £70 million in debt by the time he left Anglesey.
Howells ensures that we feel sympathy for the Marquis, giving him childlike innocence and petulance. And from the way that he’s coughing up blood in the first scene, there’s a sense that he knows he’s on borrowed time, and so he will make the most of his new position in society. He has no interest in conforming.
Jones’s sister, Lisa Baker, spent hours in the archives to write her script, but some of the final events seem more imagined than real, especially with the appearance of the killjoy Lord Penrhyn (Paul Rhys), who’s determined to get the Marquis off the island. The way in which Toppy escapes is very unlikely.
Even with Madfabulous’s shortcomings, the film is wonderfully shot, and Dan Baboulene’s score, classical-based but with a cheeky, brassy edge, is magnificent.
BFI Flare runs from 18 to 29 March.
