Potiche
François Ozon (2010)
Potiche has been a huge commercial success, especially in France and Belgium, and British critics, at any rate, are very enthusiastic. It’s a nice feeling when everyone enjoys something (unless you don’t) but anyone who thinks this film’s a popular and critical hit for the same reasons – because François Ozon has bridged what’s often a gap between different kinds of audience – is kidding himself. Ozon ‘freely’ adapted Potiche from a successful stage play of the same name, a boulevard farce of the 1970s, by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy. There’s no doubt that the gently satirical treatment of the original material is part of the film’s appeal to its enthusiasts in Sight and Sound (including Ginette Vincendeau, who wrote along with her review an interesting piece on other hits transposed from boulevard to screen – most notably La cage aux folles). And because Ozon has said the scenario reminded him of Ségolène Royal’s part in the 2007 French presidential campaign that’s enough, for some critics, to give Potiche ‘contemporary political relevance’.
I’m sure cross-channel audiences have gone for the film in a big way because its star Catherine Deneuve is so enduringly loved. Thanks to her, I doubt it would have made any difference to the box-office receipts if Ozon had reproduced the Barillet-Grédy material without irony. It’s rather as if Helen Mirren had signed up to play Mrs Slocombe in a remake of the cinema version of Are You Being Served?, the film had gone down a storm with audiences, and the director was being praised for a wittily sophisticated ‘take’ on the original. Actually, this is a poor analogy because the current S&S school of film criticism is too determinedly auteurist to be seen dead allowing domestic audiences to ‘privilege’ the importance of a British performer – or accept a television sitcom as cinema – in this way. (You might also wonder if Helen Mirren would be seen dead playing Mrs Slocombe but, since she agreed to appear in the recent remake of Arthur, that’s harder to rule out.)
The heroine of Potiche is Suzanne, the ‘trophy wife’ of Robert Pujol (Fabrice Luchini), a factory owner. Robert thinks his wife’s a decorative fool – certainly foolish enough not to notice he’s carrying on with his secretary Nadège (Karen Viard). There’s a strike over wages at the factory. Robert has a heart attack of sorts. While he’s indisposed, Suzanne takes over the running of the business (I missed why, beyond its being a plot requirement, her husband thought she was the right person to deputise for him). She turns the whole place around and gets to like the job. Profits increase and Suzanne brings harmony to the factory by charming the workers’ leading supporter, the left-wing mayor Maurice Babin (Gérard Depardieu), who turns out to be an old flame. Once Robert recovers he elbows Suzanne out of the board room, with the help of their revolting daughter Joelle (Judith Godrèche). By this time, Suzanne’s also been given the brush-off by Babin. She therefore decides on a career in politics, standing as an independent candidate against him in the upcoming election. She wins and becomes the region’s new député (although Babin continues as mayor – I didn’t get that either).
The political appendage to the story, which wasn’t in the stage play, is pathetically lazy: Ozon doesn’t bother to give us a sense of how the campaign is going – we just see that everyone adores Suzanne yet it’s a turn up for the books when she triumphs. Other than as a reminder of bad industrial relations, I don’t see that Potiche tells us anything about the 1970s – or even much about how we see the decade now. The slightly exaggerated costumes and décor may be spot on, but so what? The sex jokes, which people in the Richmond Filmhouse enjoyed, don’t take the piss out of seventies sex jokes – they merely reproduce them. When the Pujol business’s board of directors votes to decide whether Suzanne should remain in charge or Robert resume as the boss, Nadège keeps score Eurovision-style: ‘Mme Pujol – un point’ etc, One of the reviews in S&S describes this as a ‘sublime throwaway gag’! This is enough to make you wonder if the highbrow and lower-brow audiences are enjoying the same things after all …
S&S praises Ozon for ‘casting against type’ – but that implies the actors, although we see them in unaccustomed roles, are nevertheless persuasive in them. Catherine Deneuve is actually not much more convincing a trophy wife than she was a factory worker in Dancer in the Dark – it may be because she’s incredible that people have found her so enjoyable here. The whole film seems to be a love letter to Deneuve; this is where François Ozon and Gallic audiences anyway may be of one mind. We first see Suzanne jogging (the 1970s seems early for a sixtyish middle-class woman to be doing that), pausing to write a poem about a squirrel she sees en route. Potiche ends with Suzanne singing a celebratory I-love-life song as if we’ve been watching a heartwarming musical and in case we’ve forgotten (as if) that Deneuve has form in the genre. (The Pujol factory makes umbrellas, a cosy nod to one of her rightly admired screen performances.) Jérémie Renier, best known for his roles in the Dardenne brothers’ films, plays Suzanne’s son Laurent. He gives a very skilful performance: you can read it as sending up a certain type of over-bright, constricted stage acting but it has its own dynamism too, and Renier certainly looks the part – though he also looks very camp from the start so the eventual revelation that Laurent’s gay isn’t much of a payoff. (This is an example of how this film works: admirers of Potiche will describe Laurent’s gayness as an amusing ‘twist’ then, if you say it’s obvious, praise Ozon for lampooning the obviousness of 1970s comedy.)
When Gérard Depardieu first appears, he’s such an extraordinary shape – with his square features and huge gut – that he looks like a figure in an animated film. From then on, his bland performance is an evocation of the seventies of just the wrong kind: a reminder of how good he used to be. Sergi López has an amusing cameo as a lorry driver who gives Suzanne a lift when Babin ejects her from his car. It’s almost too apt a reminder (even if perhaps an unintentional one) that López is nowadays flourishing in Depardieu roles d’antan. When Deneuve looks at López and he grins back at her, we seem meant to realise Suzanne’s still a bit of a goer – but that ‘still’ hints at one of the nonsenses of the plot. It may be a reasonable joke that Suzanne turns out to have been sexually liberated as a young woman (this is one respect in which casting Deneuve makes sense) – but, in that case, when did she start being the subordinate little woman? I realise one answer is that the disempowering sexual structures of the times made her so. I think a truer answer is that Potiche wants it both ways.
26 June 2011