‘The President’s Wife’: a humorous political satire that revitalizes the figure of Jacques Chirac’s wife | Culture

In Spain it has been renamed The president’s wife, but the original French title is simply Bernadette. In her country, she doesn’t need more, despite sharing a name with the legendary shepherdess and nun of the Marian apparitions of Lourdes. Her 13 years as First Lady alongside her husband, former President Jacques Chirac, support her. Also the change in her image, which is reported in the film by the newcomer Léa Domenach, a nice political satire that leaves the president and some of his aides practically in the dust, while defending the image of a woman with a reputation for being old, surly, cold and with a bad mood, who managed to turn the polls around not only as a cohabitant of the Elysée Palace but also as a local politician.

Another French symbol, Catherine Deneuve, is in charge of giving life to Bernadette Chodron de Courcel, called Chirac after her marriage, now widow of the former president at 91 years of age, and, as this fiction “slightly inspired” by reality details with irony, ignored by the circle of power since the exquisite gag with which the film begins. Chirac, who had already been Prime Minister for two terms and Mayor of Paris for eight years, was elected President of the Republic in mid-May 1995. With his lanky 1.89 centimetres of height and standing on a pedestal, he greets his followers from a balcony, with the small railing almost at the height of his knees. His wife, whom no one pays any attention to, approaches in slow motion towards the shouting and the smells of triumph. Domenach, with good judgment, uses real images from the television of the time to illustrate the excited citizenry. But when she reaches the balcony, physically, emotionally and politically diminished, her husband, with open arms in expressive disbelief, injects her with a dirty phrase: “What are you doing here, Bernadette? You’re going to fall!”

From there, the film recounts his initial public indiscretions (the inappropriate criticisms on television of his prime minister, Alain Juppé); the hiring of a communications consultant to help him try to get out of his redoubt as a flower-show woman; the accurate intuitions about the rise of the far right in successive elections; and his own political career as a councillor and deputy mayor of the department of Corrèze. Domenach does not hold back, although some of the themes are more developed than others depending perhaps on whether the characters are already dead or not, and in this sense the careful denunciation, always in a humorous way, of Chirac’s infidelities with various women stands out, but the lack of specificity regarding one of them, “a famous Italian actress”, when all the press and the public know that it was Claudia Cardinale.

In this 21st century, and following the American model, we must thank French cinema for its multifaceted view of its most recent history of power, with abundant political films that analyze the adventures of some of its great names (among them, President Mitterrand, directed by Robert Guédiguian, in 2005). The President’s Wife It spans more than a decade, up to the 2007 presidential elections, and along the way, between truths and half-truths, jokes and reflections, without any great formal flourishes, but maintaining a more than decent level of humor, it takes the liberty of belittling some untouchables. The most important, Chirac himself, who is portrayed as a man who is rather more stupid than his image seemed to convey. And also Dominique de Villepin, eternal advisor to the president and prime minister between 2005 and 2007, who is portrayed as little more than a stuffy and silly leading man who pretends to be an intellectual, but who contributes nothing to real politics.