It’s “the” anticipated comedy of the fall: “Bernadette” by Léa Domenach, who dared to create a funny biopic on Bernadette Chirac, with Catherine Deneuve in the lead role. The actress spoke to franceinfo.
What have we learned about the real Bernadette Chirac? Her cheesy outfits? The yellow pieces? His angry looks addressed to an aging Jacques Chirac when he was too zealous towards a pretty woman? Léa Domenach was only twelve years old when the Chirac couple moved to the Elysée. In Bernadettewhich comes out in theaters on Wednesday October 4, it first shows a wounded woman, a devoted wife who gave everything for the success of her husband, who was not very grateful, but who did not lack political flair.
There is in Bernadette what fiction is needed to serve the comedy, but the essential is there: this ambient misogyny and the revolt of a woman that Catherine Deneuve embodies wonderfully, in an unprecedented duet with Denis Podalydès, chief of staff of the First Lady . Michel Willermoz gives Jacques Chirac the features of a president who seems to have come straight out of a comic strip.
franceinfo: In Bernadette, the two mandates of your husband’s president are seen from a feminine perspective which evokes a time when misogyny was completely uninhibited.
Catherine Deneuve : What’s really shown in the film is all these men together, deciding very important things and making terrible decisions, who seem to be blinded by each other. And there is only this woman who arrives and says to them: but you don’t realize? Men in politics are often quite misogynistic. There are many more women today, but ultimately, it’s still very, very difficult, always. There’s always an ease of irony when it’s a woman, it’s still a little irritating. That’s the meaning of this film: it’s a comedy about a well-known, famous woman, and a kind of revenge. Of course, it’s quite nice.
There are moments in the film where she actually has more political flair than Jacques Chirac’s entourage. In 1997, with the dissolution, she was jubilant to see that she was right against everyone.
Of course it must annoy her, but she was immediately connected to politics. And she had this right perspective, not being in the president’s office, to always make decisions between men. She had a very different vision of politics, broader, more global, I guess, because she was very close, but not too close.
The duet you do with Denis Podalydès is exhilarating for the audience. And probably for you, too?
It was a great pleasure. I had seen him in the cinema, of course, a little in the theater, but in his voice, in his way of being, of speaking, it’s something quite magical. We have the impression that it was invented there, at the moment, in the moment, this finesse… He is in another world, him. Truly, it’s incredible. He reads all the time. All the time !
You still have this attraction for young filmmakers. You trust them.
It’s not necessarily the youth that attracts me, it’s the freshness of a scenario. It could be a stranger. If it’s a good scenario, it doesn’t bother me at all whether we’re young or old (laughs).