Venice Film Festival 2010: Potiche

Potiche is a pretty terrible name for a movie (if you're not French), and its director, Francois Ozon, isn't usually much of draw for me. I've mostly seen his mid-period stuff (his earlier Water Drops On Burning Rocks stares down at me from my DVD shelf, and I've promised it I'll watch it), but he's suffered a bit of a decline lately – which is bit unfortunate as he's also been rather prolific in the same time span. So I almost didn't go to see this, because it clashed with a couple of other things, but finally I thought I'd give it a go, if only because I knew it was a comedy, and Ozon's pretty good with all that, and because I really like Ozon's europop soundtracks. In the end, I'm really glad I went. Potiche – which loosely translates as The Trophy Wife – is a very silly but highly entertaining film that looks, and plays, like a 70s British sitcom with an incredibly classy cast.

This 70s-set farce belongs, hands down, to its leading lady, the legendary Catherine Deneuve, who plays Suzanne Pujol, the pampered wife of a rich businessman and owner of an umbrella factory in a working-class area of northern France. Suzanne's husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), is a tyrant, always bullying his workers and always on the verge of a major heart attack, and when the factory workers stage a serious strike, Robert is taken hostage. To settle the dispute, Suzanne goes to an unexpected source – Babin (Gerard Depardieu), the local mayor and communist MP who has held a torch for her since a chance encounter when they were both very young. Babin helps Suzanne settle the dispute, and when Robert's doctor advises him to take a sabbatical for the sake of his health, Suzanne takes over as managing director of the factory – with surprisingly positive results.

It's hard to know exactly what makes this film such a delight since it really shouldn't work; it's adapted from a 30-year-old stage play, and that all shows. But Ozon really is a master at turning kitsch into quality, and he uses a wonderful, warm colour palette to create a screwball comedy that most closely resembles a more prudish Almodovar romp. Deneuve is simply perfect as the wife who, after years of abuse from her chauvinist other half, starts to show her cards, revealing a secret past and an inner integrity that has surprising repercussions for all the men in her life, including her camp-as-Christmas son. And opposite her, Depardieu shows a little-seen vulnerability as the ideologue who has fallen in love with a woman representing the exact opposite of all his political beliefs.

It will be interesting to see where Potiche finds its biggest audience outside of France, since it is exactly the kind of luminous, broad comedy that has made Almodovar popular with the Academy and also the kind of duff, creaky farce that we, the British, love so much. It could even bring some non-French acting awards for Deneuve, who hasn't had anything this juicy to sink her teeth into in years. I like it because it reminded me of both Carry On At Your Convenience and The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg at the same time, and a scene where Deneuve and Depardieu disco dance is just exquisite. All it needed was a man in a pinstripe suit to drop his trousers, a French maid to bend down for a bit of dusting, and somebody to exclaim “Boobies!” and I would have been in 70s heaven. It's a shame those things didn't happen, but Potiche is really just as much fun without them.