Potiche (François Ozon)

[pro-bassoonist]

François Ozon's Potiche (2010) has received a preliminary release date for the Gallic markets: March 16. Screened at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals earlier this year.

Official site and trailer:
http://www.potichelefilm.fr/

Fernando Croce

Potiche: More like Pastiche. Back in kitschy-feminist 8 Women mode, François Ozon channels Jacques Demy (pink umbrellas and all) for this plush hymn to the fabulosity of all things Catherine Deneuve. The campy tone is set in the opening sequence, as French cinema's knowing empress is introduced in a jogging tracksuit and tasteful curlers, cooing at fawns and winking at squirrels. It's 1977 and she plays the docile wife of a right-wing, openly unfaithful industrialist (Fabrice Luchini). When her husband is hospitalized after a clash with striking workers, she dons her best pearls and furs and heads out to run the factory with her adult children, reactionary Papa's girl Judith Godreche and queer-eyed artist Jeremy Renier. Though larded with lines like "Paternalism is dead" and "The personal is political," Ozon's romp is less interested in charting a bourgeois wife's private revolution than in doting on feathery coifs, split-screens, and geometric wallpaper. Deneuve does plenty of elegantly funny swanning, and works up iconic poignancy with Gerard Depardieu (as her unionist-turned-mayor ex-lover). It feels churlish to carp when a star is having so much fun, though I wish the material didn't play like a Gallic remake of Mamma Mia!

Pro-B