Cannes Film Festival: Screening for the scandal between a billionaire and a younger man

The richest woman in the world falls under the spell of a younger man. Over the course of a few years, he gifts her more than a billion dollars in cash, annuities, and works of art, until her daughter intervenes and reveals everything, in what becomes an international scandal.

It is the true story of French billionaire Liliane Bettencourt , heiress to L'Oréal, the world's largest cosmetics company, and her longtime friend and confidant, the novelist, playwright, 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 until May 24.

A disclaimer at the beginning of the film states that it is "very loosely" inspired by true events and contains elements of "pure fiction," including private communications between family members. Director Thierry Klifa made sure to change all names. Still, the film remains faithful to the true events (as chronicled in a three-part documentary talk show available on Netflix, The Billionaire, the Butler and the Boyfriend ).

Of course, Huppert bears no resemblance to the real-life Madame Bettencourt, recognizable by her heavily sprayed hair and elaborately tailored suits. In the film, the actress has silky, shoulder-length hair and a much younger appearance. She comes across as a playful Parisian who is seduced by the eccentric Fantin (the fictional version of Banier) and allows him to change everything: her clothes, her art collection, her life.

–How do you feel about learning that your film will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it will be shown out of competition?

–I'm very, very grateful. It was a complicated film to make and took a lot of my time. I even had time to make another film in the meantime. It's a great honor to be on the red carpet and in the main hall of the Cannes Film Festival with the main cast.

The Cannes Film Festival has made the brave decision to give us this exposure, as the subject matter is somewhat sensitive and quite political, and it may make some people uncomfortable. But the film is generating interest everywhere. It's sold practically all over the world, with barely a promotional video. It's a winning combination.

–Where did you get the idea to make this film?

–As soon as it came out, the story immediately fascinated me because I thought, “This isn't how it must have happened. I'm sure they're hiding a lot of things from us, not telling us.” Very soon after, I decided to make a film about the affair.

The headlines were full of money and politics, but there was no mention of who these people really were. The thousands of articles in the world's press didn't do them justice. It was easy to turn them into caricatures, and that's what they became, and it was the cause of their suffering.

My film—and this may come as a surprise—aims to rehabilitate these people: to show what can really happen in a family. Obviously, it's not your family or mine, and it affects less than 1% of the population. But behind the mountains of money and all the power this family wielded, there were cracks that existed before Fantin came along. He's just the catalyst for the explosion.

Instead of illustrating the story we already know, I thought of showing something we didn't know, depicting an environment almost never depicted in France: the environment of the big bourgeoisie, of the ultra-rich, of the very elegant families who fly under the radar and are never talked about, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, when there were no social media and not everything was reported in the press.

There is a Shakespearean, Balzacian dimension to this story.

–Much of your film is filled with real-life details, including numerous secret recordings of Madame Bettencourt's conversations. To what extent is it a work of fiction?

–It's true that there was a huge amount of information, because everything had been made public: the thousands of letters and faxes exchanged between the couple, 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 from reality and fictionalize it.

Every time a scene was based on true events, it was superimposed on reality.

But when it came to personal and family relationships, they had to be fictionalized, because I didn't hide under the table when those exchanges took place.

There is a mystery in this story, and that mystery reinforces its fictional components.

–Why did you choose Huppert for the lead role?

–I had always dreamed of working with Isabelle Huppert. Like Catherine Deneuve, she is the very embodiment of cinema. The other two screenwriters and I imagined the film with Huppert in the lead role.

I had decided not to make a biopic. If I had suggested a biopic to Isabelle, she wouldn't have liked it at all. You're coercing the actress like this, telling her to do things this way or that way, and the end result is an exercise in imitation that simply didn't interest us.

For me, it was more important to capture the spirit of the character than to find an exact likeness. When Isabelle played the investigating judge Eva Joly in Claude Chabrol's The Comedy of Power, the intention wasn't to resemble that real-life character either.

–You make Huppert look much younger than Madame Bettencourt.

–Liliane Bettencourt was very young when she met François-Marie Banier. She was 65 and beautiful. If you look at her cover photo for Égoïste magazine, she looks like Ava Gardner.

I decided to shorten the story's chronology so I wouldn't have to artificially age Huppert. That never works well on screen.

–Aren't you worried about how the Bettencourt and Banier families will react?

–I haven't made an accusatory film at all. I'd genuinely be upset if I offended anyone.

We're protected by the fact that our film is a work of fiction and that the main characters are named Marianne, Frédérique, and Fantin. This gives us some distance from what really happened.

I consider the characters in my film to be monstrous yet childlike, intimidating yet poignant.

Translation: Roman Garcia Azcarate