FILM REVIEW: POTICHE

Suzanne (Catherine Deneuve) and Maurice (Gérard Depardieu) in Potiche.

Strike de jour


By Ed Rampell

In the past few years the movies have been prophesying and mirroring social upheavals. Cut in the merry mode of Karel Reisz’s 1966 Marxist madcap Morgan!, Canadian writer-director Jacob Tierney’s uproarious 2009 film, The Trotsky, stars Jay Baruchel as a Montreal high school student who fantasizes he’s the reincarnation of the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. The deluded teenager tries to organize a union at his dad’s factory, then leads a movement to form a student union, using social media to rally pupils for their high school’s class struggle. Baruchel’s droll The Trotsky is a “holy Tehrir.”

The 2010 British film, Made In Dagenham, stars Sally Hawkins as a factory worker who leads a real life strike for equal wages and women’s rights. Even a re-mastered version of Sergei Eisenstein’s immortal 1925 masterpiece, The Battleship Potemkin, about a sailors’ mutiny that triggers a mass strike in Odessa was theatrically re-released this month.

Now, that quintessence of French femininity, the exquisite Catherine Deneuve, is getting into the act. Writer-director Francois Ozon’s Potiche, based on the play by Barilet and Gredy, is the latest addition to the growing cinematic strike wave. Like Baruchel’s The Trotsky, Deneuve’s Suzanne Pujol is related to the owners of an umbrella factory in a French provincial town, formerly owned by her late, paternalistic father, and now run by her despotic, reactionary, philandering hubby, Robert (Fabrice Luchini, whom I last glimpsed in 2008’s highly enjoyable film, The Girl From Monaco).

No, the French word, "Potiche," is not some sort of Gallic corruption of “Che” as in Guevara. The closest translation is "Trophy wife," although it could mean anything that is suppose to be decorative (and quiet). I suppose it represents Suzanne’s role as a bourgeois homemaker (with the help of the help, but of course) and mother. When first seen in character onscreen, Denueve, long renowned for her unearthly beauty, looks positively schlumpfy, like a very ordinary hausfrau. Initially, I felt disheartened to see the Chanel shill and actress who’d starred in Luis Bunuel’s 1967 surreally kinky classic, Belle de Jour, and who exemplified “class” and elegance for a generation of viewers looking so plain.

But as strikes sweep her family’s factory in 1977, Suzanne finds inner resources of resolve, and there’s more to this ornamental madam than meets the eye. She seeks out Babin (Gerard Depardieu, another heavyweight of French cinema -- both literally and figuratively, as the actor has become morbidly obese), the mayor who is a member of the French Communist Party (PCF), to amicably settle the brewing brouhaha. Here, the story takes an unexpected turn, in terms of the relationship between the proletarian man of the people and the bourgeois goody two shoes.

The umbrella factory resuscitates the lusciousness that first graced the screen in Jacques Demy’s 1963 musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Suffice it to say that once Suzanne enters the fray she becomes transformed -- psychologically as well as physically, as the renowned radiance Deneuve has been known for emanating once again illumines the silver screen, and it’s wonderful to bask in her effervescent presence again. Finding her footing, Suzanne transcends the economic realm and, in our day and age of Sarah Palin, enters politics. This is not to imply at all that she’s a reactionary like Alaska’s lobotomized, vicious ex-guv, that Godzilla from Wasilla.

In fact, Potiche’s politics are peculiar. Suzanne rejects rabid rightwing austerity economics (a knowing nod to today’s dire crises). But the film does not see Babin and the PCF as an alternative, either. Depardieu -- who once portrayed the French revolutionary Georges Jacque Danton in the Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s 1983, Danton -- depicts Babin with empathy, and he has a few good lines about being a devoted lifelong leftist who may never live to see the revolution he’s dreamt of and worked for, but he has his problems, too.

Like Daniel “Danny the Red” Cohn-Bendit’s Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, written in the wake of the historic May 1968 worker-student revolt in France, Potiche seeks a third way, another path between the traditional right and left. But instead of opting for anarchy like Dany le Rouge did, Potiche chooses a combination of feminism combined with the paternalism of Suzanne’s late father -- a sort of matriarchal maternalism.

Even if Potiche’s politics aren’t your cup of tea, it is a heady brew of comedy, romance, class struggle and song. And it’s a kick to see those French cinema stalwarts Depardieu and Deneuve – who first co-starred in Francois Truffaut’s 1980 anti-Nazi, The Last Metro -– reunited onscreen. Along with The Trotsky and Made In Dagenham, the delightful Potiche tackles the class war in an extremely entertaining, thought provoking, funny way. Don’t miss it.