This week, with the eyes of the world on the Paris Olympics, what better time to learn a bit about recent French politics?
In France, The President’s Wife is simply called Bernadette. The film’s subject, Bernadette Chirac, wife of former President Jacques Chirac, became just as famous as her husband and a lot more popular.
Catherine Deneuve plays the French icon Bernadette Chirac Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
And the film’s star is equally a phenomenon.
Every year the extraordinary Catherine Deneuve makes another film – often two or three films – and always her name is above the title.
She’s been in that unassailable position since her early films in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as the muse of Truffaut and Chabrol, Polanski and Buñuel.
She was stunning then, and she’s pretty stunning now, like a high-fashion, Vogue front-cover version of Britain’s famous Dames – Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren.
Like them Deneuve manages to find leading roles that do more than simply cash in on their celebrity.
Jacques Chirac was the bumptious, right-wing President of France in the late 1990 early 2000s. Like his contemporaries Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, he considered himself part of a new, political elite. Unlike his wife Bernadette, who was - well, just a wife.
But in fact, Madame Chirac was no slouch in the political arena herself, albeit mostly local politics.
And she soon became sick of playing the little woman behind the Great Man - particularly since she strongly suspected that her political instincts were rather more accurate than Chirac and his trendy think-tank.
So, with the aid of her one PR chap – an equally under-estimated public servant nicknamed Micky – Bernadette launched a charm offensive that surprised and delighted the French public.
Far from being the austere, conservative housewife she’d been presented as, she turned out to be funny, irreverent, even charismatic.
Comparisons were made with Princess Diana, at the expense of her often charmless husband. A Frenchman politician of the old school, Chirac achieved notoriety for his habitual infidelities and financial scandals.
And France clearly decided they preferred the style of The President’s Wife to Bernadette’s husband.
The film The President’s Wife is aimed more at a local audience than an international one perhaps.
The political scene in France can be impenetrable to the uneducated. Some of the most hostile battles seem to be between people in the same party.
But I found it fascinating for both Deneuve’s stylish performance and as an introduction to a smart and unlikely real-life character.
Despite the warning at the start of the film that this was a fictionalized version of real-life events, I have to say I found it totally convincing.
