Money does not make happiness but also freedom: this is the assumption from which the richest woman in the world of Thierry Klifa, a journey within the high French society led by Isabelle Huppert as a very wealthy heir that holds a dangerous friendship.
Nineties. Marianne Ferrère (Huppert) is head of a famous cosmetics company but always lives in the shadow of her husband, a high government official. In his great villa of sfarzosa and pacchiana, surrounded by domestics from the criminal past and by an improvised and passive daughter (Marina Foïs), one day he decides to give shots to photographer Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte) for a profile on a well-known magazine. Among the two will be an ever closer friendship that ends up endangering the family dynamics of a dynasty in the spotlight.
La scoperta della libertà
Arrogant and sarcastic as only a rich person can be, Marianne is a woman who would have so much to say but who finds no rash. Her marriage is now stale, and the family surrounding her boredom. Pierre-Alain comes down in his life all of abruptly overwhelming him, making them discover a world outside and within itself which he had never had access. She tells her what to put on to enhance her face “from movie stars”, tells her which furniture to throw and which to buy, such as Monet move to the cellar and which Redon expose, makes her laugh and the door with her in gay bars to sniff popper, becoming her first and perhaps only confidant. For her part, Marianne became her patron by organizing her first photographic exhibition and arriving at her in the years almost a billion euros. Always surrounded by the boriotic rigidity of the bourgeoisie, the woman for the first time finds someone who sees her for what she is and in this she finds her freedom, claiming her power to use at her will money, perhaps the only freedom she can access in her status as a heiresss and wife-trophy, trapped in useless rites.
Buoni e cattivi
But like a bourgeois Tom Ripley, Pierre-Alain is the fly that enters the mechanism and jams it. The daughter Frédérique and her husband are distrustful of this unfaithful, vulgar and greedy figure, which seems to amaze and radiate Marianne. But are they more concerned about your mental health or your legacy? And is Pierre-Alain really a takeover computer? Klifa leaves the dynamics deliberately ambiguous to the viewer who never understands the real nature of the relationship between the two. The film also tells the difficulty for an elderly woman to claim her independence and individuality without obstacles and to have her resources freely.
The exploration of the dynamics of the French aristocracy also passes through the political history of the country. In fact, the story is strongly inspired by the personal events between photographer François-Marie Banier and Liliane Bettencourt, heir of L’Oreal and wife of André Bettencourt, an intimate friend of Mitterrand who was invested by a scandal when his articles of philanthropist and anti-Semitic youth emerged. In the world of the rich no one is sinless, and so how can judgement be directed? Who can you trust?
© Europictures
Una diva in stato di grazia
The director seems to build the whole film around the divistic image of Huppert, always at ease in the shoes of the rigid bourgeois woman who hides a passion that can break every order. And so it works especially with Laurent Lafitte, there is a overwhelming and disruptive chemistry between the two who had already worked in Elle by Paul Verhoeven, in a dynamic perhaps even more cloudy. If of weakness is the English word to describe the circumvention of incapables, this accusation of Frédérique to the photographer, does not seem a coincidence that it is also the title of a Catherine Breillat film starring Huppert as a wheelchair director who is radiated by a young criminal. Playing with the career of the protagonist, the film seems to be part of it in a natural way.
The richest woman in the world merges bourgeois comedy and thrillers, but never building real moments of tension, which in fact explodes only in an unnecessarily long and ambiguous final. The script by Klifa, Cédric Anger and Jacques Fieschi manages only partially to reconstruct with the eyes of fiction one of the greatest scandals of France in recent years, but with the merit of underlining human events more than those of the trials.
L’articolo The richest woman in the world, the dark side of power – The review comes from Dituttounpop.it.
