by Julian Wood
Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Raphaël Personnaz, Andre Marcon, Marina Foïs, Mathieu Demy
Intro:
… a confection of missed chances.
No, not Gina Rinehart, not even the late Queen of England. This title refers to Liliane Bettencourt (here thinly fictionalised as Marianne Farrere). Bettencourt was the head of the most successful cosmetics empire in France (L’Oreal) and had an estimated worth of $45 billion! The film tries to hide behind the fig leaf of being merely ‘based on real events’ in order to avoid any legal issues; this can be both a come on and cop out in relation to dramas that are meant to stand on their own two feet.
The family depicted here are close to the centre of French power. Marriane (played in an icy but rather distracted way by movie icon Isabelle Huppert) is not only part of ‘old money’ but is married to a senior politician. Not surprisingly, the family is used to getting their own way, and yet, even the most powerful can have an Achilles heel.
This is where the drama comes in, at least potentially. Marianne is bored with all this wealth and luxury. She tells her faithful butler Jérôme (Raphaël Personnaz) that she feels dead inside. So, when brash gay artist type Pierre‑Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte) comes into her purview, she shows herself ripe for the picking. Even her dried-up old husband Guy (Andre Marcon) concedes that Fantin makes Marianne feel alive in a way that he hasn’t seen in years. He is not being directly cuckolded, as Fantin is openly gay, but he is being ‘replaced’ in her affections in a way that could be even more hurtful. The film does not explore his emotions, however. In fact, it is hard to know whose emotions it is interested in, as it mostly glosses over the deeper stuff in favour of barbed exchanges and superficial banter. This approach exposes the elephant-in-the-room flaw that almost everyone in the film is either a snob or a poseur. They all seem hollow or shallow, and this leaves us almost nothing, and no one, to identify with.
There are ‘plot’ elements in a sort of sub-Succession kind of way. We see that almost everyone close to Marianne can see that Fantin is taking her for a ride. Equally, it is plain that they all have their own interests to protect. The heir apparent is Frédérique (Marina Foïs), who comes to hate Fantin with a passion, or at least as much passion as this icy world can deign to show.
Huppert is not so much miscast here as dealt a bad hand. There is not a lot you can do with a vain and spoilt heiress that would enlist our sympathies really. Even when she is being duped, we somehow don’t feel her pain or don’t care. Lafitte is the biggest presence in the film and his portrayal of Fantin steals the film. He really inhabits the role of the oily chancer who uses his carefree flamboyance to hide his steely social climbing. He succeeds in making us hate his character even when we don’t care about the overall con.
The other strange thing about this film is that it doesn’t make more of our potential fascination with the lives of the 0.1%. Maybe it is to its credit that it does not buy into merely gawping or a drooling sycophancy about extreme wealth, though the Chateaux on display does furnish the scene.
The other problem that the film has is in deciding how much to remind us it is a real case (the French audience would not need reminding, of course). Here again, it throws away most of the frisson that this might bring. The film awkwardly inserts straight to camera confessions which lay out some of the characters’ ‘true’ feelings and motives, but this detracts rather than adds. We can’t help feeling that its storytelling should have been able to convey this anyway.
All in all, the film seems like a confection of missed chances. The basic scam, and the jaw- dropping amounts involved, and the public implosion of a ruling class dynasty, ought to be emotionally and intellectually satisfying. In the end, somehow it is none of these things.
