The French legal term “abus de faiblesse”, which translates to “abuse of weakness”, describes situations in which a vulnerable person is pushed by another to act against their own interest. When the expression appears in the news, it usually refers to sordid tales of elderly individuals manipulated by someone into giving away their money; the image this evokes is often that of a frail person completely unaware of what they are doing due to their advanced age and failing health. More rarely is the rapport of dominance imagined on psychological grounds alone. Thierry Klifa’s “The Richest Woman in the World”, playing Out of Competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, pushes the morbid scenario into even more daring and dramatic territory: rather than a mere con, this costly relationship might have been the trigger for a long-gestating personal crisis.
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Based on the real story of Liliane Bettencourt of cosmetics giant L’Oréal, the film consciously aims for light entertainment — a strikingly different tone from that of Catherine Breillat’s disturbing “Abuse of Weakness” (2012), which explored a similar dynamic and also starred Isabelle Huppert. This time, we initially find the actress in the diva mode she often adopts for her most commercial films. As the fictional Bettencourt stand-in Marianne Farrère, it is clear from the start that she will not be a conventional victim.
Marianne’s world of opulence prides itself on discretion, which has become even less visible in our era of vulgar prosperity — an age of Donald Trumps, Kim Kardashians, and Successions. Klifa successfully recreates a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when French business was still the domain of the old bourgeoisie, dynasties less concerned with displaying their wealth than hoarding it. “They hate rich people, in France”, Marianne’s daughter Frédérique (Marina Foïs) remarks: Klifa’s wealthy characters are keenly aware of their privilege and anxious about it. When Marriane decides on a whim to sign a big cheque to a magazine photographer she barely knows, the sum is a drop in a bucket for the billionaire; more importantly, it is a way for her to momentarily escape all this unending worry about money.
Would she have done such a thing if the recipient had been anyone other than the amusingly isolent Pierre-Alain Fantin? Laurent Lafitte, who previously worked with Huppert in Paul Verhoven’s “Elle” (2016), is the most outré and flamboyant element in a film of otherwise light, elegant lines, Klifa sketching out the psychology of his characters in small, accretive details. When they first meet at Marianne’s house for a photoshoot, the gay man dares to give his classy subject brutally honest but amusingly over-the-top notes on her hair, trousers, and decoration. Pierre-Alain takes Marianne by surprise — and never lets her go.
His flippant behavior brings life into the sober household and makes Marianne smile. Klifa has fun juxtaposing the duo’s irreverent goings on with Frédérique’s unamused expressions. To our delight, Foïs has plenty of occasions to remind us that she has the blank air of confused panic down to an art form. But as the cash flows out like water from an open tap, it soon becomes clear that it’s a whole set of values at risk of disappearing along with the family fortune. Klifa, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, deftly shows how the family sees emotional restraint and strong moral principles embedded within their business practice. From that perspective, Pierre-Alain’s playful cynicism threatens the foundations of that old school fortune, and Frédérique, who is a bit of a goody-two-shoes, resists him most of all.
But more than a mere agent of chaos, the entertaining intruder is a dangerously intelligent menace with sophisticated methods for securing Marianne’s loyalty. It is an open secret that this rosy version of the family history is at least partially false; one day at the dinner table, the intrusive guest lays it all out. Marianne’s husband Guy (André Marcon) wrote antisemitic articles at the beginning of World War II, before somehow being recognized with a medal for his Resistance work. His marriage to Marianne was convenient for her father, who funded Nazi groups during the war and was eager to switch camps once peace returned. An amusing family friend, Pierre-Alain’s technique for moving this relationship past the realm of politeness and into that of control is regularly breaking through the convivial atmosphere with shockingly crude comments or boisterous behavior, pushing further and further the limits of what he can get away with. His angry rant about the family’s whitewashed history of Nazi collaboration, however, is one step too far: Marianne tells him to leave… before begging him to return a few weeks later. The truth is on his side, and when further evidence of her husband’s past Nazi activities surface in the press, Marianne becomes more unsteady than ever; she wants a friend to distract her from all this ill-gained money.
There is no doubt, then, that manipulation is at play in the relationship. But Huppert’s intriguing performance, transforming from haughty pragmatism to teary-eyed vulnerability, hints at a dimension of the story that is too little explored in Klifa’s slickly produced comedy-drama. If Marianne becomes so attached to Pierre-Alain, it might be partly because she knows she isn’t entirely innocent. Klifa’s film — rather blandly directed and with a few awkward cuts, but full of carefully judged performances — nonetheless deploys a satisfyingly intricate view of the mechanisms of manipulation, showing just how far those controlling tentacles can go. In his dramatization of the Bettencourt story, the victim’s most susceptible weakness is what would seem to most like the source of her power: her extraordinary wealth. [C+]
