J Paul Johnson
It’s a wonderful thing that there is, in this day and age, a frothy leading role for Catherine Deneuve. After all, the French actress was headlining spicy, heady films like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Belle de Jour, and Repulsion way back in the mid-1960s. In The President’s Wife—originally titled Bernadette for its French release, now more generically retitled for international distribution—the Nouvelle Vague icon plays former French First Lady Bernadette Chirac in writer-director Léa Domenach’s feature debut. Deneuve’s is a performance that, mostly for the better, dominates the film.
Biopics present their own genre-specific challenges. A lived life does not necessarily a narrative make. Even beyond the challenges of casting for resemblance, charisma, or even, as the case seems to be here, name recognition, there are those of adherence to thorny historical fact. The best biopics bend the past, at least a little, in service of industry standards and prevailing trends. Only on occasion does a biopic take real risks (like, say, presenting the subject as a monkey): most aim for a relatively rote frogmarch through a known set of facts, rendering the project an exercise in mimicry.
To her credit, Domenach pulls out a set of stops to make The President’s Wife something other than your garden-variety standard biopic. It opens with a rather fanciful, even slightly pushy disclaimer that the film will not hew too closely to historical fact and should be better judged as fiction. Fair enough, though the narrative that follows hardly seems like it warrants such. There is a literal Greek chorus, except that they are French, part of the diegesis and gleefully crooning out some basic exposition. The film’s opening also employs archival footage of the real-life Bernadette Chirac during her most public years, photographed on several presidential outings.
Bernadette Chirac had just turned 62 when her husband was first elected President; the actress playing her not only bears little physical resemblance but seems also nearly two decades older. Had Domenach not so liberally used documentary footage of the actual French First Lady to open the film, I might not have noticed: the power of recall necessary to summon the visages of spouses of past heads of states is well beyond my ken. Like the spicy disclaimer and the French Greek chorus, the archival footage of real-life Bernadette seems less than necessary and foregrounds a disconnect between actor and subject it’s hard to forget.
Even so, Deneuve gamely forges on as Bernadette. At first, her character appears a little clueless in the visual age of postmodern politics, but she learns quickly. Despite being practically cut off from the public by her newly elected husband Jacques Chirac (Michel Vuillermoz), Madame Chirac, as she is now addressed, stealthily works to make the presidential palace a room of her own. She’d worked in the shadows to elect Jacques—played here as something of a clueless bumbler—and now hopes to hobnob with the political elite and celebrity glitterati.
Doing so requires an ally, so Madame Chirac enlists chief of staff Bernard Niquet (Denis Podalydès). Together, the two set about restoring her reputation with the press and the French public. It’s a feminist tale of pushing against boundaries imposed by the patriarchy, with the transformation in no small part dependent upon Niguel’s allyship. The timeline of The President’s Wife covers, for the most part, Jacques’s Chirac’s 1995 election to the Presidency through his leaving the office in 2007: Madame Chirac, to elevate her status, connives to dispense with her husband’s trusted staff members, allies herself with the media, and largely reinvents herself though celebrity associations like fashion designer Karl Lagerfield (Olivier Breitman). Doing so has its costs, especially in terms of her relationships with her adult daughters (Barbara Schulz and Maud Wyler).
Bernadette’s sly shenanigans and the costs she pays for her violating traditional norms comprise the entirety of The President’s Wife‘s slim plot. Its 93 minutes make little mention of the thorny geopolitics, international incidents, or assassination attempts that marked Chirac’s presidency, focusing instead on the degree to which Madame Chirac felt slighted by one of her husband’s or French society’s multiple microagressions. For some, that will make for an entirely serviceable and perhaps even slightly pointed feminist parable of a woman righting wrongs.
Deneuve delivers an excellent performance even if she seems in some superficial ways wrong for the role of Madame Chirac. She’s certainly got the era-requisite pastel pantsuits, the Barbara Walters hairstyle, and a wry, knowing smile. The President’s Wife may render the country’s leader himself something of a dimwit, but Domenach’s script—co-written with Clémence Dargent—lets Deneuve’s character come out from under her husband’s thumb and into her own as a public figure. Even if the film itself feels a little too enamored of its own cheeky approach to its subject matter, Deneuve’s performance is one that makes The President’s Wife worthwhile.
