In French Version ‘Bernadette’
Legendary French actress Catherine Deneuve plays Bernadette Chirac, wife of Jacques Chirac in this comedy set during his years as President of France.
The story starts with his rise to the office in 1995. His party mates are celebrating wildly inside the Elysee Palace and he’s enjoying the adulation of the crowds from the balcony. Bernadette goes out to join him but he rudely tells her to go away, to the back where she belongs. She wanders disconsolately about, largely ignored by his jubilant team, including his chief minder, their smart svelte daughter Claude.
Bernadette Chirac is at this stage an old-school political wife who has tirelessly and uncomplainingly supported her husband’s journey to the presidency, which included 18 years as Mayor of Paris. She herself holds political office as head of a regional council, but this isn’t taken seriously by her husband who doesn’t think twice about interrupting her with petty personal demands when she’s at work, even when she’s in council or doing media interviews.
She had hoped to share with him the fruits of their success, as First Lady of France standing proudly by his side. But that’s not what he has in mind, and she knows why: she is ringarde. It’s translated from the dialogue as old-fashioned, but it means more than that. It was a new one on me so I looked it up: tacky, lacking style or quality in an embarrassing way. Our equivalent might be daggy.
He teases her publicly with her nickname La Tortue (‘the tortoise’), because she’s slow and always lagging behind him. But she loves tortoises, and early on her daughter gives her one for her birthday, the celebration of which he gives a miss because he’s too busy.
He’s merciless. When she ticks him off for seating her away from him at an official banquet and flirting with a younger woman, he tells her she’s lucky to have married him!
His staff are no better. Daughter Claude isn’t as cruel but she’s in her father’s camp and to keep her mother in line she appoints a fellow with a reputation as a yes-man to be Bernadette’s Chief of Staff, expecting he’ll keep her docile. But this ‘Nicky’ Niquet turns out to be a staunch ally when she finally gets fed up with being scorned and brushed off and decides to start standing up to her husband. The last straw is seeing him pissing on her beloved tortoise in the garden.
Their campaign starts with some hard facts: according to polling, she IS perceived as being cold, sour-tempered and dowdy. She needs an image makeover.
First up, she’s always worn Karl Lagerfeld but her wardrobe needs an update. There’s a very funny scene where Lagerfeld is called in to do the job and rudely declares that it’s about time: ‘People think I haven’t made anything new since 1978!’ The actor playing him is parfait as the vain, primped, pony-tailed, bejewelled, overdressed designer who keeps his sunglasses on indoors.
He turns her out very smartly, and she flaunts her nickname at the world when she starts wearing tortoise brooches on her new, elegant jackets.
She hits the campaign trail on her home turf and wins hearts and minds with a wildly successful project to collect centimes (pennies or cents) for a children’s charity.
She starts saying bolshie things in public. When her husband tells a campaign crowd that ‘faithfulness matters’ she mutters audibly ‘that’s news to me’.
The new-look Bernadette flourishes. She becomes a media darling and starts to throw her weight around in the Elysee. The flunkeys who once colluded in Chirac’s dismissive treatment of Bernadette now start pandering to her, to her husband’s annoyance but to our great amusement.
There are some wonderfully comical moments in The President’s Wife. It’s the first feature film of documentarian Léa Domenach, who states that it is ‘above all a work of fiction’, which I suppose gives her licence to portray Chirac and his cohort as almost caricatures of men in power. In fact, the actor playing Chirac (Michel Vuillermoz) has somewhat gross features and actually looks like a cartoon caricature of the real Jacques Chirac, who was a good-looking man.
Jacques Chirac died in 2019 so he’s not around to defend himself against this unflattering portrayal of both his looks and his character. But he sure does get his comeuppance here for his failings as a husband. He was apparently the daddy (or should that be papa?) of them all when it came to cheating on his wife, a practice that’s almost traditional for French Presidents. Emmanuel Macron seems to have broken the mould but check out the love lives of Francois Mitterand, Francois Holland and Nicholas Sarkozy.
Sarkozy is in the story playing a role in both the political shenanigans and the marital duelling. In fact the plot ends with him becoming President in 2007, when Chirac stepped down for health reasons, calling Sarkozy ‘that traitor’.
You don’t have to be a French politics buff to follow the political action or get the jokes. Domenach has a skilfully light touch here.
My one quibble with this movie is that the farcical tone is at odds with the more serious family themes. The Chiracs’ other natural daughter Laurence has a role, but she introduces a tragic note. She had an eating disorder and died in 2016. There are sad tender scenes between her and Bernadette, but considering their adopted Vietnamese daughter was left out altogether, you wonder why Laurence’s story is given so much attention in what is essentially a romcom-cum-political satire.
Leaving that aside, The President’s Wife is a real charmer, with plenty of laughs, and there’s even a kind of Greek chorus singing funny songs that echo the comedic action.
Deneuve is very good as Bernadette Chirac. She looks her age but it’s a flattering portrayal compared to the one of her husband. But then he’s dead and she isn’t. She’s still with us at 91.
Fun fact postscript: Both Chiracs were accused of corruption during his long tenure as Mayor of Paris, for handing out plum jobs to their supporters. He was convicted in 2011. Bernadette escaped that ignominy, but the movie shows her joyfully getting away with just such a manoeuvre in the case of Nicky.