Starting off as a power play it ended up as metaphor for a writer’s reality, which can best be illustrated by another famous French writer on his deathbed, enquiring after the wellbeing of one of his fictional creations.
Another Ozon film, 8 Women, was set in the Fifties and had eight of the top French actresses of the time working out who murdered a man they were all related to in one way or another. Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Beart were four of those women.
But what made the film unusual was the fact that they would variously burst into song every now and again.
Ozon clearly likes working with women and vice versa, and in Potiche he teams up with Deneuve again. This one is set in the Seventies and starts off with the 67-year-old housewife jogging along a country road in a red tracksuit – and curlers. She is well-off housewife Suzanne Pujol, who also jots down poems, which are excruciatingly bad. We soon learn that she is a compliant trophy wife, une potiche.
Her husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), is a typical bourgeois boor. He married her so that he could get his grubby little hands on her father’s umbrella factory and have an affair with his younger, busty secretary. But the workers are giving him such uphill that he has a heart attack and Madame Pujol takes over, agreeing with and to many of the workers’ demands.
Helping her is an old flame, the socialist MP and mayor of the town, Maurice (a very corpulent Gerard Depardieu). Will they restart their old love? Is her son possibly his?
From being a suburban goddess Mrs Pujol becomes a flag bearer for women in the workplace, which is all very well, but she seems to have sentimental leanings towards the way her father did business, which was to give your worker a gold watch and a signed photograph of yourself after years of loyal service as a farewell present. Seriously.
But this is supposed to be a farce. Luchini’s character doesn’t quite crack the modern equivalent of a Molierian miser, which is not his fault. Yes, the ever elegant Deneuve could be a metaphor for, say, a contemporary Christine Lagarde, but Deneuve has never done poker-faced French comedy, let alone maternal warmth, very well.
So there’s very little to laugh out loud about in this rather long attempt to send up the French bourgeoisie. This could be because it’s taking its own, not exactly new or sophisticated political message way too seriously.
Neil Sonnekus
* Next week this time the New Zealand International Film Festival begins.
No comments:
Post a Comment