Film Review: The Richest Woman In The World

★★★★☆

The Scoop THE RICHEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD Isabelle Huppert ©Manuel Moutier

Premiering Out of Competition at Cannes in 2025, Thierry Klifa’s The Richest Woman in the World arrives with the glossy whiff of scandal and the even glossier whiff of perfume capital.

The film is loosely inspired by the Bettencourt affair, but Klifa, co-writing with Cédric Anger and Jacques Fieschi, is not interested in making a courtroom explainer or a political dossier in designer heels. He wants melodrama. He wants farce. He wants the kind of old-money family rot that looks elegant from a distance and fungal up close.

Marianne Farrère, played by Isabelle Huppert, is a cosmetics empress whose life is disturbed, then electrified, by the arrival of Pierre-Alain Fantin, a younger writer-photographer played with peacocking gusto by Laurent Lafitte.

Marina Foïs plays Marianne’s daughter Frédérique, who watches the whole thing with the expression of a woman realising that money cannot buy satisfaction, only better lawyers.

The smart move is that Klifa does not pretend the film is journalism. That choice gives the film its real flavour. This is not *Succession* in French drag. It is slower, more poisonous, and far less interested in deal flow than in the humiliations that money cannot prevent.

If American screen satires of wealth often rely on noise, Klifa prefers clipped cruelty, muffled doors, and the dead-eyed politeness of people who have been rich for so long they no longer need to announce it. In other words: less private jet porn, more drawing-room venom.

Huppert is magnificent because she refuses the easy version of Marianne. She does not play her as a saintly victim, nor as a monstrous fool. She plays her as a woman whose money has made her both sovereign and stunted.

Marianne is imperious, childish, cutting, needy, and intermittently thrilled by the possibility of being seen as something other than a vault with cheekbones. One moment, she is a blade. The next, she is almost girlish, or perhaps simply relieved to be desired in any form at all. Huppert’s genius has always involved making stillness feel active. Here, even her pauses seem upholstered.

Lafitte, meanwhile, gives the film its bad manners. His Pierre-Alain is a beautifully tacky disruption agent: flamboyant, sly, vulgar, hungry, and just self-aware enough to weaponise camp against decorum. He blows into Marianne’s world like a hairdryer on maximum heat. The movie needs that energy because so much of its structure depends on collision.

Huppert and Lafitte make an expertly mismatched duo, the sort of pairing that turns manipulation into choreography.

Foïs is excellent as the daughter who has spent so long speaking the language of damage control that she can barely recognise love unless it arrives as a legal threat.

Raphaël Personnaz, as the watchful butler, lends the film a hush of suppressed knowledge. Everyone seems to know too much. That is half the joke. The other half is that nobody knows what to do with any of it.

Visually, the film understands a crucial fact about old money: it is rarely loud, but it is always curated. Cinematographer Hichame Alaouié, working with art director Eve Martin and costume designers Jürgen Döring and Laure Villemer, gives Marianne’s universe a sealed, exquisite chill. Gold-glazed light. Plush interiors. Control-freak reds. Surfaces so polished they may as well be emotional hazard signs. The whole movie looks as though it has been dusted with expensive powder and ancestral guilt.

What lifts the film above pure gossip is its socio-political undertow. The real Bettencourt affair broadened into questions about elder exploitation, political financing, and the proximity between private fortune and public power.

Klifa narrows that field on purpose, but he keeps enough historical poison in the bloodstream to suggest that obscene wealth is never just personal; it is dynastic. It is inherited. It remembers things badly and strategically.

So, is it perfect? No. Is it juicy? Absolutely. Huppert alone makes it worth the ticket. Klifa may not deliver the definitive political autopsy of the Bettencourt universe, but he does offer something bracingly weird: a French bourgeois tragicomedy in which money magnifies every appetite and solves none of the loneliness.

Think The White Lotus after a strict Swiss finishing school. Think Chanel No. 5 with traces of arsenic.

The Richest Woman in the World opens in cinemas nationally on 21 May.

Check the website for session times.

Website: https://www.palacefilms.com.au/the-richest-woman-in-the-world

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