‘Potiche’ is a silly French trifle

Potiche. Welcome to 1977.

By Josh Bell

Thursday, April 7, 2011 | 10:30 p.m.

Based on a French stage play from the 1970s, Francois Ozon’s Potiche feels like a bit of a relic, not only because it takes place in 1977 but also because Ozon films it like it was made in that year. A story about labor disputes and feminism should probably not be this silly and insubstantial, but the director’s facility with throwback visuals and his cast’s liveliness make up for the movie’s overall pointlessness. Deploying gaudy period costumes and hairstyles along with a relentlessly sunny score and plenty of split-screens and whimsical scene transitions, Ozon creates a zippy, entertaining experience that only slightly wears out its welcome before exiting the stage.

The Details

Potiche

Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Fabrice Luchini

Directed by Francois Ozon

Rated R

Beyond the Weekly

IMDb: Potiche

Rotten Tomatoes: Potiche

It helps that French screen icons Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu play the lead roles: The always classy Deneuve is Suzanne Pujol, wife of the head of an umbrella factory. Tired of spending her days knitting and writing inane poetry, Suzanne enthusiastically takes on her husband’s position when he’s forced to take an illness-related leave of absence. Soon she’s fostering harmony with the contentious workers’ union and encouraging women to take up positions of power in the company. Depardieu plays a local progressive politician who’s as interested in getting in Suzanne’s pants (as he once did decades earlier) as he is in helping her improve working conditions at the factory.

Although it tackles some of the prominent issues of its time period, Potiche is entirely superficial and not particularly interested in social commentary. That’s fine when Ozon focuses on the sex-farce aspects of the story (the paternity of the Pujols’ son is a persistent mystery), but there’s a sense of lost opportunity as well. Potiche could have been a pointed satire or an over-the-top comedy, but instead it’s no more than a mildly amusing trifle.