Directed by Potiche
(R)
**
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It’s still “hard to resist” the charms of Catherine Deneuve, said Keith Uhlich in Time Out New York. In this uneven French-language comedy, the 67-year-old “grande dame” of Gallic cinema plays the ornamental wife, or potiche, of a philandering 1970s French industrialist, and “everything she does is just so darn cute”—even when her husband triggers a worker revolt at his umbrella factory and she’s forced to step in. She patches up the mess overnight, of course, “but the feminist-awakening stuff is the least interesting angle of the picture,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Movieline.com. At least director François Ozon “seems to know it.” While some of his subplots “are a bit too adorable,” the “lollipop colors” he favors suit the film’s air of “go-for-broke silliness,” and Ozon lets Deneuve topple all obstacles before her “like a cheerful Disney princess.” Fellow giant of the screen Gérard Depardieu brings “amusing panache” to his role as an old flame she must work with to settle the worker unrest, said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. But this is la Deneuve’s film, and she proves to be “a charming, witty centerpiece from start to finish.”
