Feminism was only a rumor in the Pujol household, where weasely husband Robert (Fabrice Luchini) rules the roost with the same cockeyed arrogance inflicted on the workers of his umbrella factory. The family business was actually begun by the kindly father of his wife, Suzanne (Catherine Deneuve), yet she seems entirely happy to play the supporting role. “Your opinion?” Robert sputters in dismay. “You're job is to support my opinion!”
But it's 1977 and the winds of change will echo even inside stately Pujol manor. In his delightful comedy Potiche, French director Francois Ozon savors the look of the era's high-end Euro style, much of it still swank after all these years, down to the candy-colored '70s typeface spelling out the credits. The loving period recreation provides a handsome setting for a light satire of mores and politics.
While recovering on a long sea cruise from the shock of being taken hostage by strikers, Robert relinquishes the umbrella works to Suzanne, whom he expects will be nothing more than a mannequin warming the executive seat. But Suzanne's old lover, the town's Communist mayor Babin, convinces the regal woman to bargain in good faith. She revitalizes the employees and the product line and refuses to step down when her husband returns. The dastardly Robert, however, has other ideas.
Although Babin comes across better than Robert, he's also something of a buffoon and a chauvinist. Suzanne's grown children represent opposed tendencies; her son is an artist whose fashionable liberalism aggravates the old man but the daughter is daddy's girl, down to commissioning a “modernization” study calling for the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage Tunisia.
The word potiche is a slangy analog to the American “trophy wife,” a role too vacuous for Suzanne once she tasted responsibility in the wider world. A bedroom farce where everyone is cheating on everyone else, Potiche's genial satire of the bourgeoisie's discrete charm is enlivened by Deneuve and Depardieu, whose sympathetic chemistry has lit screens since the '80s.
Potiche is showing at the Oriental Theatre.
