The last time Haley Bennett starred in a gloriously romantic period piece, it was Joe Wright’s daring musical re-imagining of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” 2021’s “Cyrano.” She’s back in lavish gowns and rapturously beautiful settings in “Widow Clicquot,” Thomas Napper’s ode to (in no particular order) champagne, doomed romance and girl power. If it’s neither as bold nor as swooning as “Cyrano,” it does provide additional evidence that Bennett slips easily into the 19th century as both an object of beauty and a force of nature.
The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it is one of a number of wildly varied films in which women claim power that had been denied to them in patriarchal societies.