La Bonne épouse.
I gave up on the French Film Festival too early. The best was still to come but all is not lost. Martin Provost’s joyful La Bonne épouse / How to Be a Good Wife looks like being carried over for a season.
Like many of his fellow French film makers, M. Provost specialises in films with strong female leads. He did the so so Sage Femme with Deneuve and Catharine Frot and a couple with Yolande Moreau, who turns up again here, but this one comes as a surprise.
This time it’s the nineteen sixties and the École mènagère Van Der Beck residential academy for turning school girls into suitable French wives is doing it tough - fifteen less takers this year. Matronly headmistress Juliette Binoche heads up a staff comprised of her husband, lecherous François Berléand, his sister Moreau and, in a splendidly ego free performance, militant nun Noémie Lvovsky who learned how to handle shot guns in the Resistance and is prepared to use the one at the Institute on young male “communists” who trespass.
When not being taught useful skills like needlework, grocery purchases and flipping
pan cakes, the girls discuss boys and clothes but the news of social change is seeping
though to them.
This already troubled situation is about to come under even more pressure with
accidental death, bankruptcy and suicide all requiring response from Juliette who has
never learned to drive the car or balance a check book. Fortunately help is at hand in
the shape of bearded banker Edouard Baer who appears to represent all the things
they warn the girls to be wary of as he lures Juliette to the shack-up resort on the hill.
The women expand into their suddenly found roles. Juliette discovers the rejuvenating
effect of slacks and Yolande overcomes her broken heart in a manner that delights all
her associates.
With the situation more or less in hand, Juliette gets the institute covered by a news
crew (in black and white four by three) in preparation for their participation in a Paris
Home Economics Fair.
Binoche & Lvosky - La bonnne épouse.
Their bus arives but it’s Le Joli mai and the roads are jammed. Now energised, Juliette declares she will not let the girls miss Paris. The Eiffel Tower hoves into viewon the sky line and they switch into a splendid musical number with the cast callingout the names of women role models as they dance down the roads. To Frida Karlo and Marta Hari, Lvosky riposts Joan of Arc. They could have had Agnes Varda whowould have been at home in this one - after all they’ve already cited Jean Vigo in apillow fight showering white slowmo feathers like the one in his Zéro de conduite.
That’s the second time this week for one of these musical finales, my having watched Jack Hulbert in You Tube’s 1936 Jack of All Trades where they put on the dancing shoes to wind up their straight material. It works a treat in films made seventy years apart.
This one’s a source of genuine delight, not the least from finding Binoche triumphantly at the top of her game representing that apparently inexhaustible line of French divas around whom their industry has been able to build a succesion of superior French A feature Women’s movies - Gina Manés, Michèle Morgan, Annie Giradot. This one doesn’t preach. It celebrates its premise with contagious joy.
Unsurprising that it takes a bloke to make a good feminist movie.
Barrie Pattison 2020.
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