Potiche

With Potiche, gay director Fran�ois Ozon takes on a play about a trophy wife who proves remarkably effective as a power player when her husband takes ill and can no longer head the family umbrella manufacturing firm.

Alas, the translation from stage to screen does not fare well. Ozon, who adapted the play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gr�dy, has an eye for visual and narrative composition that crosses Douglas Sirk with John Waters by way of Pedro Almod�var's color schemes, but hilarity stubbornly fails to ensue. The story is structured as classic farce, with numerous revelations, reversals, trysts, and betrayals, and the characters are written with bone-dry tongues rasping against their cheeks. How did it all go so wrong?

Star Catherine Deneuve, who plays Suzanne Pujol--the title character, given that "Potiche" (literally, "vase") translates to a slang equivalent to "Trophy Wife"--exhibits zero comic skill here, a failing that most of the cast share in abundance. Even G�rard Depardieu can't raise a smile as the town mayor, Maurice Babin, who may in fact be the father of Suzanne's gay son Laurent (J�r�mie R�nier). Sadly, it spoils nothing to come out and note Laurent's sexual orientation here, though the film treats it as a big surprise to be sprung in the closing reel.

The film turns on Suzanne's evolution from placidly vapid housewife to corporate head honcho and politician, with class and gender warfare being the operative sources for the film's volleys. The film is set in 1977 and almost feels like a mirror-universe paean to 21st-century American-style family values, which ought to been another guarantee of rich satire. God knows that if the source material offered too few gags, American headlines from the last few years could readily have supplied supplemental inspiration. What Suzanne needs is some Palin-esque pizazz, and Deneuve could have used a little Sarah in her delivery. Quelle dommage: Such cross-pollination was not to be. As it is, even lines that should guarantee guffaws plummet leadenly, rather than dropping like gems.

The plot's crisscrossing complications don't bear mapping out here, because they are tedious and forced. The trick with farce is to take just such belabored schematics and make them into fluffy concoctions. This movie wanted to be just such a treat, but Ozon's cinematic souffl� fell. Only Fabrice Luchini, who plays Suzanne's philandering husband Robert, offers a comic glimmer.

The saying has it that tragedy is easy, but comedy is hard. In this case, comedy is a right salope. Ah, cruelle!