Catherine Deneuve makes a stately but good-humoured procession through a bland, underpowered true-life political dramedy that somehow manages to be very apolitical. Deneuve plays Bernadette Chirac, the wife of Jacques Chirac, the former Paris mayor who became president of France from 1995 to 2007, seeing off Le Pen’s far right, but pilloried in Washington as the “cheese-eating surrender monkey” who wouldn’t support the Iraq war, and was finally mired in corruption scandals.
Deneuve portrays Bernadette as Chirac’s haughty but outspoken first lady, resplendent in Lagerfeld couture, who has long endured her husband’s endless affairs – and in fact, like the French press and public, hardly seems to notice them, a Gallic worldliness quite unlike the attitude in Britain or the United States. Yet when Princess Diana is killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997, and the president is embarrassingly absent from his post at this historic moment, he is finally tracked down in Italy by a kind of emergency incident team with a stricken-looking Bernadette in the room; they all hear an unnamed Italian woman on speakerphone telling “Giacomo” someone wants to talk with him. (This episode on its own, assuming it’s anywhere near the truth, might have made the basis for an entire film.)
Michel Vuillermoz plays Jacques Chirac as a fastidious grump, deeply disapproving of Bernadette’s attempts to be in any way important or useful to his administration – at one stage actually passing her a note while she is making a speech, reading: “Taisez-vous!” (“Shut up!”) Vuillermoz doesn’t show us any of Chirac’s frisky side and, in his mandarin-style hauteur, he in fact more resembles the former socialist incumbent who they all despise: François Mitterrand. But he comes to respect his wife’s political instincts. Veteran character turn Denis Podalydès gives an amiably jokey performance as Bernard Niquet, the PR man brought in to give Bernadette a softer image, and Laurent Stocker plays Nicolas Sarkozy, the machiavellian smoothie whose duplicity both Chiracs distrust.
It all tootles along inconsequentially enough, like a daytime soap about nothing very much in particular; all the supposedly important things feel negligible in terms of political or emotional weight. Deneuve herself brings style and presence to the film, but it’s difficult to know what to make of her slightly inscrutable air of bemusement in the face of all the déclassé idiocy with which she is routinely confronted. It is a mannerism that works perfectly well in almost every scene, but it could just be Deneuve’s Resting Icon Face. At any rate, she plays the first lady as to the manner born.
• Bernadette is released on 5 January at the French Institute, London.
