Thierry Klifa, “The Richest Woman in the World” (2025)
This film by Thierry Klifa is loosely based on the so-called Bettencourt Affair that held France in thrall back in 2010, in which L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt became friendly with novelist / photographer François-Marie Banier and bestowed upon him many gifts – including life insurance policies worth several hundred million euros, a sizeable art collection worth €20 million and huge amounts of cash – leading to her daughter Françoise Bettencourt Meyers lodging court proceedings to have Mum declared mentally incompetent and subjected to elder abuse. The actual scandal not only exposed the estranged relationship between mother and daughter, it also engendered another, potentially more serious political scandal in which secret tape recordings made by her butler not only revealed that Bettencourt had apparently made Banier “sole heir” to much of her considerable fortune, but that Bettencourt had also given various French conservative politicians envelopes of cash and avoided paying tax by stashing money in Swiss bank accounts.
Wisely perhaps, Klifa’s film comedy / drama adaptation of L’Affaire Bettencourt avoids covering the political scandal and concentrates on the human stories behind the Bettencourt-Banier relationship and its consequences. While understandably the characters’ names have been changed, the film otherwise faithfully follows how the scandal plays out. Marianne Farrère (Isabelle Huppert) meets Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte), an aspiring artist / photographer, at a magazine photoshoot, and from there their relationship develops into a close friendship and eventually romance to the chagrin of her husband Guy (André Marcon), their daughter Frédérique Spielman (Marina Foïs) and her husband Jean-Marc (Mathieu Demy). After Marianne makes Pierre-Alain a beneficiary to life insurance policies worth eye-watering amounts of euros, and bequeaths other expensive assets to him, Frédérique takes court action against Pierre-Alain, leading to a police raid on Marianne’s home and seizure of her assets, and arrest of Pierre-Alain himself. Pierre-Alain is eventually hit with two years’ imprisonment and is barred from ever meeting or talking with Marianne again.
The film is not so concerned with its plot as it is with the personalities involved and the historical class cultural context behind a wealthy heiress who falls heavily for a freewheeling artistic dandy who does whatever he likes and gets whatever he wants, however unscrupulous and grubby this makes him. For all her wealth and political power and influence, Marianne lives a constrained and dull life, in a mansion resembling a museum more than a home, with her daily routines dominated by the same rituals of work, board meetings and appointments with her lawyers and accountants, interviews by starry-eyed reporters for lifestyle magazines, and drinks and parties with politicians and other elite establishment figures. Meeting Pierre-Alain introduces her to a new life, one more colourful and uninhibited than what she has known and experienced so far, and Marianne laps up this unexpected freedom eagerly – a situation that Pierre-Alain exploits to his benefit.
Perhaps because Lafitte eats up the screen with his portrayal of the vulgar Pierre-Alain, audiences end up hating him though his character is essentially a stereotype. The Spielmans initially come across as concerned and caring but even they have their interests – as in, financial interests. Only Guy appreciates that Marianne might be entitled to something more stimulating and better for her mental health than the current life she leads – but unfortunately an argument between him and Marianne leaves him with injuries that hasten his death. The central figure of Marianne, played by Huppert with her usual icy hauteur, is hard to sympathise with, given her cosseted lifestyle and her strained relationships with her husband and daughter, and audiences may very well see Pierre-Alain’s manipulation and exploitation of her patronage as something she jolly well deserves.
In developing the film as character studies of the people involved in the Bettencourt-Banier scandal, Klifa superficially touches on some troubling aspects of French history, in particular the close collaboration between wealthy French Catholic industrial families and Nazi German officials during the Vichy era (early 1940s) and the discriminatory attitudes of French elites towards Jews and other minorities in the early 20th century. Marianne’s frosty relationship with her daughter may stem in part from Frédérique having married a Jewish man and deciding to raise their son as Jewish; it is equally likely that Frédérique married Jean-Marc as part rebellion against the Catholic faith.
Ultimately though in hewing very closely to real-life events, Klifa’s film does not come to a definite resolution or closure: mother and daughter do reconcile but the reconciliation is handled in such an offhand way that it can be missed, and we never learn how the court’s decision to stop Pierre-Alain from approaching Marianne affects her. For all Huppert’s reputation as a talented and skilled actress, she never gets much grip on Marianne and that may be because Marianne as a character sketch has very few redeeming qualities. With one-dimensional characters in a plot that avoids tackling really meaty issues about class, elite culture and past French treatment of Jews and other minorities, the film ends up being little more than a long glossy soap opera.