French Film Festival 2025
The Richest Woman in the World (La Femme la plus riche du monde) from director Thierry Klifa is an imagined version of a real-life scandal involving the heir to the L’Oreal fortune, Liliane Bettencourt and photographer François-Marie Banier.
An unsurprising view of how the richest of the rich live is revealed as the self-serving mores of their level of society are shown at every turn. Marianne Farrère (Isabelle Huppert) shares a sumptuous house with her husband Guy Farrère (André Marcon), their daughter Fréderique Spielman (Marina Foïs), her husband Jean-Marc Spielman (Mathieu Demy) and their son Charles (Paul Beaurepaire). As the heiress of the cosmetic firm Windler, Marianne is a woman utterly assured of her place in the world as Isabelle Huppert so magnificently displays in her astute performance. She is frank, brusque and unquestionably in command. Yet when super cocky photographer Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte), a dominant overbearing man with no sense of boundaries, arrives for a prestigious photoshoot, Marianne is drawn under his spell like a besotted lover despite the age difference and his being overtly gay.
The consequences of the arrival of this mercenary cuckoo in the Windler nest, who thinks nothing of the results of letting his mouth run off and regards speaking rudely to servants in the Ferrare household, like the loyal Jérôme Bonjean (Raphaël Personnaz), as a form of egalitarianism, is brought to monstrously believable life by Laurent Lafitte as he boldly takes control commanding changes of clothes and furnishings, to say the least.
Marianne feels newly alive joining Fantin, who has shown her how to ‘release what is inside’, at his gay clubs where she samples a wilder side of life. She and Fréderique behave more like business partners than mother and daughter but when Marianne becomes so blind to the ruthless behaviour that her adoption of Fantin is on the cards, the family’s slow discombobulation plays out, resulting in litigation.
Klifa brings in the complexities of the family history in WW2 when Guy, who flirted with the Nazis before joining the Resistance seemingly more out of practical survival than political belief, is now grandfather to a Jewish boy, Charles, because his daughter converted to Judaism.
La Femme la plus riche du monde is a suitably expensive looking film with all round flawless acting. Although the main players in this shocking story of seriously disturbing dynamics are neither warm nor particularly likeable, it is a lesson in what intense loneliness, vulnerability and dependence can lead to no matter a person’s wealth.
Running time: 122 mins
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 