Potiche kicks off second week of French film fest

François Ozon's film Potiche translates to English as "trophy wife," but the term is better understood as a "decorative vase."  

"When I think about a trophy wife I think about a young, beautiful woman the man marries after he has made it in the world," Laura Mason said as she introduced the film, which kicked off the second week of the third annual Tournées Festival of Contemporary French Cinema.

A professor in both the German Romance Languages and Literatures Department and the Film and Media Studies Department, Mason's expertise in the French language, culture and filmmaking history made her an ideal speaker for the night.

"[Suzanne Pujol] is not the young, beautiful, second wife. Potiche refers more to an ornamental vase that you put in your hallway and admire, and it's there but you don't necessarily think about it."

Potiche centers on Suzanne, brilliantly portrayed by Catherine Deneuve, and her liberation from housewifery.

The film begins in her later years and although she was beautiful in her day — several scenes show a young, sultry Suzanne seducing men — she's not the prize of a pissing contest but rather the prize of an ideal nuclear family.

Her presence in the household is reassuring and completes the family portrait, but she is as deaf, dumb and blind as a vase.

She's ignorant to her husband's infidelities, and, when she speaks up, he tells her that her place is neither in the kitchen nor at the nightclub, but only in the background, silent and nodding.

When head of the household Robert Pujol falls ill and leaves the country for several months, Suzanne takes his place of power in the home and the factory. As acting CEO of their umbrella factory, she squashes the union strikes and enlists her son and daughter to work for her, all while becoming a beloved leader.

An interesting sparring for power follows, a result of complex family relations and obligations. Their daughter Joëlle is torn between her mother, father and husband, and questions of paternity arise.

A lover emerges from Suzanne's past to encourage her emancipation from misogyny, but in a poignant scene, deserts her when he finds out that he was just one of many suitors.

Many of Potiche's characters speak up for women's rights — at the start of the film, Joëlle accuses her mother of being a content and ignorant housewife — but betray their fears when it comes time to act. Director Ozon handles the intricacy of his characters skillfully, creating layers for the public, the self and the idealized self. "Ozon is a prolific and successful film director," Mason said, praising his repertoire of films.

"He's been as successful abroad as he's been at home. What distinguishes Ozon from most of the other directors whose films were shown last week is that his movies are more varied. He really kind of bounces around in terms of mood, plot and interest."

Ozon has shown that he can handle quiet, meditative films such as Under the Sand but also has fun with witty, sassy comedies such as 8 Femmes and Potiche. "What ties his films together is his foreground of strong female characters. He's really worked with some wonderful French actresses," Mason continued. Ozon is known for drawing out the best qualities in his leading ladies.

Deneuve in Potiche is no exception, leaping gracefully from the shelf to the plush CEO armchair to the political podium. Her transformation is subtle but eventually an unstoppable force: one insight into the teeth beneath her skin quickly leads to another and another, until she triumphs in the face of her doubters. In a weaker film with a weaker actress, those triumphs would falter beneath our modernized, cynic gaze.

Ozon is said to have repeatedly asked himself while making the film, "How is this relevant today?" Potiche is a remake of a popular play from 1977, a pivotal era for women in France.

Although the play had a groundbreaking ". . . sense of looking at the new world, a world in which politics are changing and ideas about women's roles are changing," according to Mason, transporting the same story and drama to a 21st-century movie has its perils.

Ozon bridges the decades by not shying away from the problem. "He plays with the historical distance but also updates the film," Mason said.

"This movie just revels in aesthetic anachronism. It's full of the neon colors of the 1970s, there are lots of old French songs that evoke the period and the daughter has wildly blow-dried hair . . . There is a wallowing in the look of the ‘70s."

Potiche doesn't strive for an authentic immersion and instead dresses itself in the ‘70s as if donning a costume. Ozon doesn't try too hard to evaporate the temporal distance. He embellishes and modernizes the actual storyline instead, making the son's sexuality ambiguous and inserting obvious references to Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign against Ségolène Royal for the French presidency in 2007.

In Potiche, Suzanne runs against the incumbent male MP in an added third act to the original play and visits a cheese factory on the campaign trail, a nod to Royal's emphasized support for goat cheese, which was from her native region.

The film frequently and hilariously depicts the left against the right, in one scene simply by offering the choice to sit on a couch on one or the other side of the room.

Potiche is gratifying not just because of its witty leading lady, but because it follows the rise of the underdog. When Jöelle asks her mother if she is happy at the start of the film, Suzanne replies, "Of course I am. I made up my mind to be."

At the factory, Suzanne sympathizes with the workers and tells them that as her husband, Robert is her boss too, but conditions are even worse because she can't strike. It's this complacency that Suzanne finally rises from, both sexually and socially.

The light-heartedness of the film keeps the stakes from ever rising too high (even as the antagonist, Robert is more a caricature than a real threat; a balance held up by Fabrice Luchini's brilliant acting) and plays on a sense of private knowledge that pervades the film. Ozon and Suzanne always seem to know more than they're letting on, and every time the viewer leans in to hear a secret, they lean back to giggle.

The audience on Monday night thoroughly enjoyed Potiche, which was a a bounce back after Friday night's Les chansons d'amour (Love Songs), which viewers left with wrinkled eyebrows and a host of questions under their breaths. The audience for Potiche laughed out loud throughout, and there were audible murmurs of approval for Suzanne during some of her most exultant victories. The screening was attended by mostly graduate students, with a smattering of undergraduates, professors and local community members.

The Tournées Festival closes this Thursday with a screening of Of Gods and Men, a film that depicts the struggle of eight French Trappist monks against fundamentalist violence in an Algerian village.

It will be shown in French with English subtitles, and the screening will be followed by a panel discussion led by William Egginton and Kristin Cook-Gailloud, who are both from the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures.