Potiche

Potiche

Directed
by François Ozon 

Runtime: 103 min.

“My management style is warm, fun, human,” says
Catherine Deneuve in François Ozon’s Potiche.
She plays Suzanne Pujol, the perfectly undemanding haute-bourgeois homemaker
who, in taking over her husband’s umbrella factory, demonstrates unexpected
panache. All the same can be said of Ozon’s latest experiment, this time
cobbling together seemingly disparate art movies genres in a style warm, fun
and human.

By satirizing the idea of a trophy wife
(“potiche” in French), Ozon plays with Deneuve’s ideal woman image. Together,
they explore social politics in the best way they know—through familiar genre
styles: Disney fantasy, Demy musicals, Fassbender melodrama and Godard
agit-prop. Ozon exposes various narrative artifices and simultaneously the
social constructs now taken for granted and political remedies that used to be
thought of as feminist.

Ozon uses poems, songs, dreams, theatrical
staging, slide-show frames, slipping through farce and propaganda, to entertain
a viewer’s sense of delight. When Suzanne reunites with a past lover (Gerard Depardieu
as the union leader who negotiates with the feminist exec), the flashback
ingeniously parodies that out-of-fashion 1970s notion that “the personal is
political.” Suzanne confesses: “I betrayed my class, I betrayed my husband.
Which one is worse?” Potiche
highlights the intellectual rigor missing from Almodóvar’s recent mashups of
sexual politics and cinema heritage. It’s another signpost on Ozon’s
apprenticeship toward cinema mastery.