The Richest Woman in the World

 

Behind every great fortune lies a crime. 
— Honoré de Balzac 

Thierry Klifa chooses the most dangerous material a director can handle: a real scandal, still raw in the French collective memory, with living heirs and active lawyers. He does so by renaming the characters, shifting the outlines, transforming chronicle into myth — an operation that, when it succeeds, produces universal narrative; when it only partially succeeds, produces an interesting film carrying some unresolved tension between ambition and caution. 

The Richest Woman in the World belongs to the first category only in part, and to the second with more honesty than it perhaps cares to admit. 

For those unfamiliar with the real events: Liliane Bettencourt, heir to the L'Oréal brand, had in the final years of her mental clarity forged a bond with photographer François-Marie Banier, recipient of gifts worth nearly one billion euros. Her daughter Françoise filed suit for abuse of weakness; the household butler secretly recorded conversations that revealed embarrassing political ramifications, stretching as far as the illegal financing of Sarkozy's presidential campaigns. In the background, the collaborationist past of Liliane's husband, André Bettencourt, who had written antisemitic articles during the Occupation — a detail of lacerting historical irony, given that the family fortune rested on an empire founded by a man of similar convictions, later inherited by a Jewish woman. 

Klifa does not tell all of this. He distils its philosophical essence: money as an amplifier of tensions already present, not their cause. Wealth does not corrupt the characters — it reveals them. It drives them to their own extreme consequences with the ruthlessness of a chemical reagent. 

The choice of a comic register is the film's most courageous and most defensible decision. Comedy here does not lighten: it protects. It protects the viewer from the excess of judgement, protects the characters from being reduced to moral categories, and protects the director from the obligation to take sides on what the film shows without wishing to explain. 

Laurent Lafitte builds Pierre-Alain Fantin with a controlled exuberance that is the film's finest performance: the man is simultaneously ridiculous and fascinating, parasitic and sincere, a petit bourgeois who believes himself an artist and perhaps genuinely is one in some lateral sense. The 2026 César for Best Actor is deserved, not least because Lafitte manages the feat of never allowing the viewer to determine, until the very end, whether Fantin truly loves Marianne or is simply conducting the longest and most refined of self-interested seductions. This ambiguity is the film's beating heart and its most genuine existential contribution: the question of whether a relationship built on economic asymmetry can nonetheless be authentic is one that no court ruling can resolve. 

Marianne Farrère is yet another incarnation of the quintessential Huppert character: the woman who holds maximum control and is at the same time the most exposed, the one who governs everything and cannot govern herself. Huppert wears seventy different outfits over the course of the film — never the same look twice — and in this costume choice lies a precise philosophy: extreme wealth as an infinite performance of itself, the necessity of changing appearance so as not to reveal that beneath the appearance nothing stable exists. Luxury as concealment of absence, not of poverty. 

One of the film's most unsettling narrative axes is the relationship between Marianne and Frédérique — a bond that cinema usually portrays as mutual wounding, but which here takes on a colder and more difficult coloring: the almost structural indifference of a mother toward her own daughter. 
Marianne does not appear not to love Frédérique for contingent or biographically traceable reasons; she seems unable to see her, as though the daughter represents something that disturbs the deep order of her own existence — perhaps the mirror of a continuity she never chose, perhaps the uncomfortable witness to a life that cannot be told without cracks appearing. Marianne's distrust of Frédérique is more radical than hostility: it is a form of elective blindness. She prefers to open herself to a flamboyant, unpredictable stranger rather than to the person who carries her own blood. 

Here the film touches something philosophically unsettling: absolute wealth can generate such autonomy from the need for others that even the filial bond becomes optional, negotiable, revocable. Frédérique endures this exclusion with an opacity that Marina Foïs renders heartbreaking precisely because she never makes it explicit — and her silent suffering is, paradoxically, the loudest thing in the film. 

The family collaborationism and the everyday antisemitism that run through the real story appear in the film as what Klifa rightly calls an underground current: not a message to be stated, but a tension that traverses the narrative. It is the film's most intellectually honest choice, and also the one on which it takes the greatest risk. For an underground current, if never brought to the surface, can become invisible — and there is a difference between suggesting and eliding. 

The historical paradox of the real affair — a cosmetics empire built by an antisemite, inherited by a Jewish woman, then at the center of a scandal that would have exposed its foundations — is explosive material that the film grazes with elegance and never fully explores. It is the choice of someone who does not want to make a political film, yet constructs a film that inevitably carries a political dimension. In this sense Klifa is more honest than many: he admits the contradiction rather than resolving it artificially. 

The decision to interrupt the narrative with black screens — stylistically bold, divisive in reception — follows a logic the film itself justifies: polyphonic storytelling, multiple perspectives, the need to allow each character's point of view to emerge independently of dialogue. It is a solution that functions as a Brechtian distancing device: it breaks immersion, reminding the viewer that what they are watching is a construction, not a transparency. In a film about how narratives — familial, judicial, mediatic — shape reality, this choice is not ornamental but structurally coherent. 

The Richest Woman in the World is a film that uses comedy as a distorting lens rather than as an anaesthetic. It asks the right questions — how much does wealth distort relationships? How much can a family's history determine the ethics of its heirs? Can a bond built on interest ever also be genuine? — without having the presumption to answer them. 

Its limitations are the limitations of any operation rooted in a real and still open event: the need to disguise without erasing produces at times a grey zone in which fiction loses the freedom it should have earned for itself over chronicle. Klifa is freer than he was obliged to be, but less free than he might have dared. 

Everything real in life is unprovable, and everything that can be proved is not real. — Marcel Proust