The Current French Cinema - Tom Ryan reviews THE RICHEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD (Thierry Klifa, 2025) & THE STRANGER (François Ozon, 2025)

La femme la plus riche du monde /The Richest Woman in the World (2025, Thierry Klifa, 121 minutes)

Thierry Klifa

Former film journalist Thierry Klifa’s film is, an opening caption announces, “loosely inspired” by the 2010 Bettencourt affair. So, first, some background. Billionaire Liliane Bettencourt (who died in 2017) was the wife of a high-ranking French cabinet minister. He’d formerly been a member of a pro-Nazi group supported by her father, from whom she inherited the L'Oréal empire in 1957. Thirty years on, she met a photographer (for the magazine, Egoïste), befriended him and became his benefactor, their relationship eventually opening the door to a scandal that embroiled not only members of her family but also the Sarkozy government. (1)

The details of that case are more or less consistent with what happens in the film, although the characters’ names have been changed not so much to protect the innocent, presumably, as to ensure that the filmmakers don’t end up in court. Klifa puts it slightly differently: “Rather than illustrate the story we already know,” he recently told The New York Times. “I thought I would show something we didn’t know, represent a milieu that has almost never been represented in France: the milieu of the grande bourgeoisie, of the ultrarich, of very chic families who slip under the radar and who are never spoken about – especially in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was no social media and everything wasn’t all over the press.”

In the film, co-written by Klifa, first with Cédric Anger and then Jacques Fieschi, Bettencourt becomes Marianne Farrère (played by Isabelle Huppert), the head of Windler Paris, a woman lost in an airless world where everything is in its proper place and money is the everyday currency of intimate exchange. 

Guy, her cabinet-minister husband (André Marcon), is solid and supportive but staid, his values in sharp contrast those of flamboyant photographer Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte), who works for a magazine that’s now (hilariously) Selfishand who likes to light up every room he enters. Although he can be entertaining – Marianne is immediately drawn to him – he is most certainly not to be trusted. 

Lafitte exuberantly embraces the part, as he has similar roles in recent times (Th e Party’s Over! / Classe Moyenne, Class Reunion / T’as pas change and the TV series, Class Act / Tapie). “There’s nothing more sinister than good taste,” his Fantin reflects, loudly, as he’s introduced to the conservative claustrophobia of Marianne’s existence, going on to draw her out of the prison of her wealth that she’d thought was her fortress against the world.

 

Isabelle Huppert 

Alongside them, their presences gradually increasing in significance, are Marianne’s stepdaughter, Frédérique (Marina Foïs), her husband, Jean-Marc (Mathieu Demy, son of Jacques and Agnes Varda), and Marianne’s butler, Jérôme (Raphaël Personnaz). Initially, Fantin charms Frédérique by telling her she’d look very pretty without her glasses – she removes them immediately and we never see her wearing them again – but she’s soon suspicious of his motives and bewildered by his bravado. “Have you always been like this?” she asks. “We’re happier when we dare,” he replies past a provocatively raised eyebrow.  

He immediately sums up Jean-Marc as a man who’s doomed to mediocrity because he doesn’t. On the other hand, his radar remains on full alert, and with good reason, as soon as he encounters Jérôme, who, like him, is gay. And, embodying the spirit of the proverbial cat among the pigeons, he knows everyone’s secrets (except for Jérôme’s) and how to exploit them. 

Klifa’s film doesn’t sidestep the dark aspects of his story – specifically its connections to what took place in France during the years of the German Occupation – and the film maintains its distance from all the characters. But he still manages to make us care: “I never tried to make these characters likeable, or to force any emotional attachment,” he says. “What mattered was staying as close as possible to their inner truth. 

They are both monstrous and deeply childlike. If emotion does emerge, it’s through their vulnerabilities, their solitude.”  

     (1) The affair is the subject of the three-part 2023 documentary, The Billionaire, the Boyfriend and the Butler, currently available on Netflix.

L'Étranger/The Stranger (2025, François Ozon, 122 minutes)

François Ozon

The Stranger is François Ozon’s 25th feature, co-written with regular collaborator Philippe Piazzo and based on Albert Camus’ famous novel, first published in 1942. Both book and film are set in Algiers in 1938, a time of turmoil marked by increasing hostility to French oppression. With a population of around seven million, six million of whom were Muslim, it had been a colony for more than a century with independence still more than two decades away. (1)

Shot in black and white with Morocco playing Algiers, Ozon’s film – like Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation (2) – remains relatively faithful to Camus’ original with its simple plot, its enigmatic protagonist and narrator, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), and its sketch of a society trying to make sense of a man who’s simply not interested in its rules. Its chief difference lies in how it draws to the surface the social and political circumstances in which Meursault finds himself. “I felt I was pulling on a thread that Camus had woven without developing,” Ozon says.

The film opens with a French cinema newsreel from the 1930s, effectively an advertisement designed to attract Europeans to view Algeria as a desirable place to visit, totally erasing its troubled history. A precursor perhaps to the current American president’s visualisation of Gaza as a tourist destination! 

Benjamin Voisin

In the next sequence, Meursault is introduced, a shadowy figure finding himself sharing a large detention cell with a group of Arab men. Asked why he’s there, he announces, “I killed an Arab,” before the film plunges into the past that has led to his incarceration and that has determined his fate.

Like Camus’ Meursault, Ozon’s remains a mystery, a metaphorical blank page who tempts us to try to inscribe motives on him for his mindset only to thwart us at every turn. The lack of emotion in Voisin’s performance is compelling; he could easily be an actor in a Bresson film. As Ozon’s studied compositions watch Meursault either in close-up or wide-shots shared by others, Voisin’s responses give nothing away. And Meursault is watching too, an impassive observer as the world passes him by, perhaps wondering about what he’s seeing, perhaps not. Several times during the course of the film, he says he’s bored by it all. (3)

For the actor, the demands of the role made for an unexpected challenge. “Playing absence is extremely draining,” Voisin says. “Doing almost nothing, saying almost nothing, is intensely physical! At the end of each day of shooting, I was utterly exhausted.

One effect of this air of detachment attached to Meursault is to shift our attention on to what’s happening around him. When news arrives of his mother’s death, Meursault travels to the countryside to visit the aged-care home where her body awaits burial. As he indifferently goes through the motions of what’s required, what emerges in scene after scene are the rituals ruling what’s going on: the expectation that he’ll want to see her body for the last time (“What’s the point?” he asks), the vigil as he sits overnight with her coffin, the other residents at the home filing in to say their farewells, the horse and carriage that serve as a hearse, the procession to the church, the mass, his black armband… 

He’s a person with desires – and they’re manifested in his relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder, who has the demeanour of a young Juliette Binoche) – but his disengagement is palpable, and that makes the world around him a key issue for the film. The signs in the cinema foyer forbidding entry to “indigenes”; his neighbour (Pierre Lottin) brutalising his Arab mistress; Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit), whose brother Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani) is the man Meursault subsequently kills; the traces of racism that infect interactions in the street; the courtroom rituals; the propositions put forward there about his crime. Was it premeditated? Was it in self-defence? Was it chance?

The film invites us to decode all of this, and to see it in a wider context, social and historical. In a scene that doesn’t happen in the novel (the only one from which Meursault is excluded as a witness), Marie and Djemila come face-to-face during a break in the trial, Djemila’s protests about how her brother has been forgotten by the trial leading to Marie’s attempt to defend Meursault’s place in the scheme of things (“His home is here”), which produces a scoff from Djemila that says everything that needs to be said. Neither Djemila nor Moussa have names in Camus’ novel.

Featuring an edgy score by West African Arab composer Fatima Al-Qadiri (and including The Cure’s 1980 song “Killing of an Arab” over the closing credits), Ozon’s film is gripping, politically astute and, finally, like its source, deeply unsettling.

 

            (1) Algeria was where Camus was born (in 1913) and where he lived until 1942,     when he moved to Paris, eventually joining the Resistance.

        (2)     Ozon on Visconti’s adaptation: “I obviously watched Visconti’s 1967 film. In one of his interviews, he confessed that he hadn’t been able to make the film he wanted, that he had been frustrated, that he wasn’t happy with it, and that his initial choice for Meursault was not Mastroianni, but Delon, which was honestly a much better idea. The perfect incarnation of Meursault in the 1960s was indeed the young Delon, who featured in Le Samouraï, or, even better, the Delon from Antonioni’s L’eclisse, who, in my opinion, would have been the ideal Italian director to adapt The Stranger.”

            (3) Ozon on Meursault: “I identified with him completely! To me, he’s a filmmaker! He looks around him; he sees characters, actors. The others are acting their lives. But not him, he refuses to play along. He never lies. Life is a stage play from which he is absent. However, he sees the beauty of the world, and its violence too. And when he observes this violence, he doesn’t intervene. He remains a spectator. Until the very end, when he finally rebels and becomes the actor of his own life!”