The jubilant broadness of François Ozon's Potiche is both its biggest liability and its selling point: From frame to frame, the movie might alternately buoy you and wear you down -- I've seen the movie twice, and both times I've stumbled out thinking, "Now that wasn't so bad!" Seeing Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu together in the same movie is, at this point, hardly a terrible thing, and their finest scene together -- they get down, ever-so-gently, on the lit-up, blinking floor of a disco -- is one of the movie's more effervescent pleasures.
Set in 1977, Potiche -- which writer-director Ozon adapted from Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy's 1980 play -- features Deneuve as a cheerful, efficient wife, Suzanne, who steps in to run the umbrella company partially owned by her domineering, philandering husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), when he's taken hostage by striking workers. To get him freed, Suzanne has to ask a favor of Maurice (Depardieu), a local bureaucrat and former union leader who is also an old friend -- perhaps at one time even more than a friend.
Once Suzanne begins negotiating with the disgruntled workers, she finds she has the common touch: For her first meeting with them, she suits up in a special, flouncy dress, as if she were trying to make a good impression on a first date. Awestruck that she's willing to consider their demands -- and respectful of her, since her own father had run the company efficiently and fairly for years -- the workers become proverbial putty in her hands. When Robert takes a leave of absence to restore his health after his nerve-jangling hostage experience, she turns the company around practically overnight, and also makes the point that women can do a lot more than flit around the house looking pretty.
The feminist-awakening stuff is the least interesting angle of the picture, and Ozon seems to know it. Ozon is often guilty of overstylization: His mannered whodunit musical, the 2002 8 Women, which also featured Deneuve, was overworked to the point of lifelessness. Potiche may be just as mannered, but somehow it seems less phony -- it's more in touch with its go-for-broke silliness, and the lollipop colors Ozon is so fond of come off as more energizing than grating. (The production design is by Katia Wyszkop.) Lazily, Ozon lets a few subplots dangle, and some of the actors don't seem to know what to do with their roles: Judith Godrèche plays Suzanne's prissy daughter, Joëlle, as if she were a repressed Charlie's Angel. And Jérémie Renier shows up as Suzanne's possibly gay -- wink wink, nudge nudge -- son Laurent, although the character seems to exist just so Ozon can put him in Ken-doll clothes and a hairdo that points up his uncanny resemblance to the young Michael York. It's all a bit too adorable, and not wholly necessary.
The chief reason to see Potiche -- maybe the only reason -- is Deneuve. Depardieu, even in his younger days, was always a bear of a man; now he's a rather rotund handful, and while his gruff, reluctant smile hasn't lost its charm, it might be better if there were a little less of him to love. Deneuve, on the other hand, whisks her way through Potiche like a cheerful Disney princess of a certain age, efficiently shooing off any excessive Ozonified staleness that threatens to creep in. And it's a relief to watch an actress who hasn't vested every ounce of her energy to be a younger version of herself. That's not to say Deneuve doesn't look great. But she carries herself as if she doesn't care that she's just a little rounder than she was 10 or 20 years ago. And in an age when actresses start fussing with their faces well before they've grown into them, Deneuve still looks like Deneuve. The word potiche refers to a pretty but useless household item or, by extension, a trophy wife. Deneuve is neither; you'll never find her languishing on a shelf.