The Richest Woman in the World
There’s a bitter irony in Thierry Klifa’s The Richest Woman in the World (La femme la plus riche du monde) – a film whose title promises grandeur but delivers a story steeped in loneliness. Loosely inspired by the infamous Bettencourt affair – in which the late L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt lavished nearly €1 billion on a charming society gadfly – Klifa’s dramatic comedy forgoes realism in favour of satire.
Isabelle Huppert, as ever, does the heavy lifting. As Marianne Farrère, the film’s stand-in for Bettencourt, Huppert finds flickers of childish delight beneath the formidable poise of a woman ensnared by her own solitude. One particularly telling moment sees her seated at the head of the corporate boardroom table, her father’s monochrome portrait looming behind her. Her eyes gleam with something between devotion and arrested development as she fondly recalls his unparalleled business acumen – revealing a daughter eternally seeking her father’s approval.
Marianne’s descent – or rather, awakening – begins when she strikes up a baffling friendship with Pierre-Alain (Laurent Lafitte), a flamboyant writer-photographer who flatters, flirts and manipulates with equal finesse. Their scenes together are strange and compelling, particularly as Marianne, well into her seventies, trails him through seedy nightclubs and scandalous soirées like a teenager sneaking out for the first time. Huppert plays these moments with a brash naïvety, suggesting a kind of belated coming-of-age.
The film falters, however, in its structure. Faux-interview segments scattered throughout – featuring Marianne’s exasperated daughter Frédérique (Marina Foïs) and the family butler (Raphaël Personnaz) – attempt to frame the scandal in hindsight. But these devices feel more like narrative clutter than genuine insight, detracting from both the mystery and the ambiguity at the film’s core. Tonally, the dark comedy never quite finds its footing, while the drama struggles against the disjointed, fragmented framework. The gestures towards insight are clever, but rarely delivered with conviction.
What lingers is not so much the scandal as the quiet strangeness of a life lived at a remove – from family, from reality, from consequence. The Richest Woman in the World is most affecting when Huppert is alone in the frame, charting the eerie, often absurd contours of isolation within extreme wealth. At its best, the film captures the hollow theatre of privilege with unsettling clarity.
Christina Yang
The Richest Woman in the World does not have a release date yet.
Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival coverage here.
For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.
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