The world’s richest woman falls under the spell of a younger man. In the space of several years, she gives him more than $1 billion in cash, annuities and works of art — until her daughter steps in and reveals all in what turns into an international scandal.
That’s the true story of the French billionaire Liliane Bettencourt, heir to the world’s largest cosmetics company, L’Oréal, and her longtime friend and confidant, the author and photographer François-Marie Banier. A fictionalized version of the saga — “The Richest Woman in the World,” starring Isabelle Huppert — will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, which runs through May 24.
A disclaimer at the movie’s start says it is “very loosely” inspired by real-life events and contains elements of “pure fiction,” including private exchanges between family members. And the director Thierry Klifa has made sure to change all the names. Yet the movie still hews very closely to the actual events (as recounted in a three-part documentary available on Netflix, “The Billionaire, the Butler, and the Boyfriend.”)
Admittedly, Huppert looks nothing like the real-life Madame Bettencourt, who was recognizable by her heavily lacquered coiffure and strictly tailored suits. In the movie, Huppert has silky shoulder-length hair and a much younger look. She comes across as a playful Parisienne who is seduced by the flamboyant Fantin (the fictionalized version of Banier) and allows him to change everything: her clothes, her art collection, her life.
In a recent video interview, Klifa discussed the scandal, why he became interested in it, and why he chose Huppert. The conversation, translated from French, has been edited and condensed.
How does it feel for your movie to have its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it will screen out of competition?
I’m very, very pleased. This was a complicated movie to make, and I’ve been working on it for a long time. I even had the time to make another movie in between. It’s a great honor to be on the red carpet and in the big Cannes Film Festival movie theater in the company of the actors.
The Cannes Film Festival has taken a brave decision to give us this exposure, because the topic is a little bit touchy and quite political, and it may make some people cringe. But the movie is getting interest from everywhere. It’s been sold practically all over the world, just with a promo reel. It’s a winning combo.
Where did you get the idea to make this film?
When this story first came out, I was instantly fascinated, because I thought to myself: this is not how it happened. I’m sure that plenty of things are being hidden from us, and that we’re not being told about them. Not long afterward, I decided to make a movie about the affair.
The headlines were full of talk of money and politics, but there was no mention of who these people actually were. The thousands of press articles around the world did not do them justice. It was easy to turn them into caricatures, and that’s what they were turned into, and it made them suffer.
My movie — and this may sound shocking — sets out to rehabilitate them: to show what can really happen in a family. Obviously, it’s not your family, and it’s not mine, and it affects less than 1 percent of the population. But behind the mountains of money and all of the power that this family had, there were cracks that existed before Fantin came along. He was just the catalyst of the explosion.
Rather than illustrate the story we already know, 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.
There is a Shakespearean, Balzacian dimension to this story.
So much of your movie is steeped in real-life details, including the many secret recordings of Madame Bettencourt’s conversations. To what extent is it a work of fiction?
It’s true that there was an enormous amount of information, because everything had been made public: the thousands of letters and faxes exchanged between the pair, the diaries, the newspaper articles. I investigated the story for three years. Having been a film journalist for 11 years before becoming a director, I found it fascinating to start with reality and fictionalize it.
Whenever a scene was inspired by actual events, there was an overlap with reality.
But when it came to the personal, family relationships, they had to be fictionalized, because I wasn’t hiding under the table when these exchanges took place.
There’s a mystery to this story, and this mystery reinforces the fictional aspects of it.
Why did you choose Huppert for the title role?
I had always dreamed of working with Isabelle Huppert. Like Catherine Deneuve, she is the very incarnation of cinema. The film’s writers and myself imagined the movie with Huppert in the title role.
I was determined not to make a biopic. Had I proposed a biopic to Isabelle Huppert, she would not have enjoyed it at all. You’re constraining an actor, telling them to do things this way or that way, and the end result is an exercise in mimicry that we just weren’t interested in.
It was more important for me to capture the spirit of the character rather than to aim for exact resemblance. When Isabelle Huppert played the investigating magistrate Eva Joly in Claude Chabrol’s “Comedy of Power,” she wasn’t made to resemble that real-life character either.
You’ve made Huppert look a lot younger than Madame Bettencourt.
Liliane Bettencourt was very young when she first met François-Marie Banier. She was 65 and beautiful. If you look at his cover portrait of her for “Égoïste” magazine, she looks like Ava Gardner.
I decided to shorten the timeline of the story so that I wouldn’t have to artificially age Huppert. That never works well onscreen.
Aren’t you worried about how the Bettencourt family and Banier will react?
I have absolutely not made an accusatory film. I would be sincerely upset if I offended anyone.
We are protected by the fact that our movie is a work of fiction and that the main characters are named Marianne, Frédérique and Fantin. That gives us a certain distance from what actually happened.
I find the characters in my movie to be monstrous yet childish, threatening yet touching.
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