Catherine Deneuve makes a stately but good-humoured procession through a bland, underpowered true-life political dramedy that somehow manages to be very apolitical. Deneuve plays Bernadette Chirac, the wife of Jacques Chirac, the former Paris mayor who became president of France from 1995 to 2007, seeing off Le Pen’s far right, but pilloried in Washington as the “cheese-eating surrender monkey” who wouldn’t support the Iraq war, and was finally mired in corruption scandals.
Deneuve portrays Bernadette as Chirac’s haughty but outspoken first lady, resplendent in Lagerfeld couture, who has long endured her husband’s endless affairs – and in fact, like the French press and public, hardly seems to notice them, a Gallic worldliness quite unlike the attitude in Britain or the United States. Yet when Princess Diana is killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997, and the president is embarrassingly absent from his post at this historic moment, he is finally tracked down in Italy by a kind of emergency incident team with a stricken-looking Bernadette in the room; they all hear an unnamed Italian woman on speakerphone telling “Giacomo” someone wants to talk with him. (This episode on its own, assuming it’s anywhere near the truth, might have made the basis for an entire film.)
