François Ozon's latest work, a comedy called Potiche, proves that he is the king of bisexual cinema. Ozon has a great sense of comic timing, camera motion, and art direction. Overall, Potiche is a celebration (and not a riot) of bright colors and cinematic moodsâparticularly Hitchcockian suspense and Sirkian melodrama. In the film, which is set in 1977, Catherine Deneuve plays a trophy wife for an industrialist, and GĂ©rard Depardieu plays a communist member of parliament. In the central scene of the movie, Deneuve kisses Depardieu. It happens on the steps leading down to a seedy nightclub. The two most famous French film stars stop, get lost in each other's eyes, and lovingly, slowly, gently connect. Disco music rises from the club.
In the early pages of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, we are told that some stars are so close to each other that they exchange star-stuff. In Potiche's kissing scene, we can almost see something like an exchange of star-stuff between Deneuve and Depardieu. This star-stuff is the glittering history of French cinema. It flows from one dazzling face to the nextâall of those movies they have made for nearly half a century.
Radiating from this kiss is a plot concerning a rich family that runs an umbrella factory. There is trouble at the plant, the workers want more time, more money, more benefits. But the father of the rich family (the great Fabrice Luchini), who manages the plant, will have none of this. A strike explodes, the father is kidnapped, and it is up to his trophy wife and her old lover, the commie MP, to fix the broken world. The film, which is also about the rise of neoliberalism and the death of social democracy, ends with Deneuve facing the future, the '80s. 
