Binoche headlines midwinter treat
How to Be a Good Wife (M, 109 mins) Directed by Martin Provost Reviewed by James Croot ★★★1⁄2
In French with English subtitles
For more than two decades, Alsace’s prestigious Van der Beck’s School of Housekeeping and Good Manners has been training teenage girls to become perfect housewives.
However, lately the numbers enrolling have been falling, as the Swinging ’60s means French women are increasingly marching to the beat of a different drum.
With its increasingly outdated mandate and curriculum it has struggled to keep up with the changing times.
Among the 15 students embarking on the patented twoyear programme to learn ‘‘the seven pillars to delight their future husbands’’ is one who has cookery tutor Gilberte (Yolande Moreau) and spiritual adviser MarieTherese (Naomie Lvovsky) greatly vexed. ‘‘We have a redhead,’’ frets Gilberte. ‘‘She’ll turn the sauces.’’
Concerned that she’ll also jinx the school, Marie-Therese offers to nail a cross above her bed.
Headmistress Paulette (Juliette Binoche) though dismisses their objections as superstitions – until her husband Robert (Francois Berleand) fatally chokes on a rogue bone in the rabbit stew prepared by this year’s class.
Worse still, a post-mortem investigation into the school’s finances he so closely guarded reveals they are more than 20,000 Francs in debt, money gambled away on a large number of horse races. As Paulette contemplates ruination, help comes from an unexpected source, bank manager Andre Grunvald (Edouard Baer). But, as a former beau who still holds a candle for her, his assistance will come at a price.
A kind of a cross between St Trinians and Call the Midwife, How to Be a Good Wife is a perfect midwinter treat for lovers of French farce. The luminous Binoche and company deliver heightened performances that make the most of writers Martin Provost (who also directs) and Severine Werba’s broad-humoured script. Subtlety is most certainly not du jour in this fast-paced, somewhat chaotic period comedy.
Much of the humour though, actually comes from Paulette and her fellow teachers’ ‘‘advice’’ to their young charges, and the costuming and production design is top-notch.
The little-bit-too-tidy ending and musical denouement may be too much for some, but there are certainly enough memorable moments to make this worth considering venturing out for.