Jacques Chirac, who died in 2019 at age 86, was accompanied throughout his political life by his wife Bernadette, who took on high-profile roles in her own right while turning a blind eye to her husband’s affairs with other women. “It wasn’t just a marriage of love, but a marriage of ambition,” Bernadette admitted in 2015, a rare public comment from a French first lady who for most of their six decades of marriage kept her private life to herself.
While the premise of The President’s Wife brims with potential, the execution falters, leaving the film caught somewhere between satire and sincerity. The whole film plays like a daytime soap about nothing very much in particular. All the supposedly important things about this period of French history feel negligible in terms of political or emotional weight. Catherine Deneuve herself brings style and presence to the film, but it’s difficult to know what to make of her slightly inscrutable air of bemusement as she attempts to navigate around the machinations of male-dominated French politics. Deneuve, as always, delivers a commanding performance. She imbues Bernadette with a wry wit and steely determination, showcasing the nuanced layers of a woman long overshadowed by her husband. Her presence elevates even the film’s weaker moments, making Bernadette a compelling figure to watch.
Deneuve portrays Bernadette as Chirac’s haughty but outspoken first lady, resplendent in Lagerfeld couture, who has long endured her husband’s endless affairs – and in fact, like the French press and public, hardly seems to notice them, a Gallic worldliness quite unlike the attitude in Britain or the United States. Yet when Princess Diana is killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997, and the president is embarrassingly absent from his post at this historic moment, he is finally tracked down in Italy by a kind of emergency incident team with a stricken-looking Bernadette in the room; they all hear an unnamed Italian woman on speakerphone telling “Giacomo” someone wants to talk with him. (This episode on its own, assuming it’s anywhere near the truth, might have made the basis for an entire film.)
Michel Vuillermoz plays Jacques Chirac as a fastidious grump, deeply disapproving of Bernadette’s attempts to be in any way important or useful to his administration. At one point, ne actually passes her a note while she is making a speech, reading: “Taisez-vous!” (“Shut up!”) Vuillermoz doesn’t show us any of Chirac’s frisky side and, in his mandarin-style hauteur, he in fact more resembles the former socialist incumbent who they all despise: François Mitterrand. But he comes to respect his wife’s political instincts. Veteran character turn Denis Podalydès gives an amiably jokey performance as Bernard Niquet, the PR man brought in to give Bernadette a softer image, and Laurent Stocker plays Nicolas Sarkozy, the Machiavellian smoothie whose duplicity both Chiracs distrust.
