Based ever so slightly on real life, National Treasure Catherine Deneuve plays Bernadette Chirac, wife of France’s 22nd President Jacques Chirac. After years of servitude to her husband’s career, when the time arrives for her to take residency in the Elysée, she doesn’t take kindly to the marginal position she is expected to live in.

Her emergence from the shadows cast by Jacques underlines most of the film’s humour. It’s marvellous to see Deneuve in a comic role and her timing and way with nuance is unflinchingly good. She is a class act and her role is written to bring this to full fruition. The subtlety shown raises the humour without resorting to joke after joke.

This is feminism shown in a most French way and it’s fabulous. Writer, director and producer Léa Domenach shows she has a way with comedy and has an irreverent approach where amusement comes from a large number of step-outside moments that surprise and entertain. Hard to see any other country making a film like this and that is indeed a compliment.
Rob Hudson
www.facebook.com/madmanfilms

Writer/director Fred Cavayé’s gripping new historical drama set in Nazi occupied Paris of 1941, is based on the multi Molière Award-winning play from Jean-Philippe Daguerre, and stars the legendary Daniel Auteuil in one of his most superlative screen performances to date.

The film co-stars Gilles Lellouche as François Mercier, an ordinary man whose only goal is to start a family with Blanche (Sara Giraudeau), the woman he loves. François works for Mr. Haffmann (Auteuil), a talented Jewish jeweller. Under the German occupation, the employer and employee are forced to strike a deal which, over the following months, will upend the fate of all concerned.

In FAREWELL, MR. HAFFMANN, the viewer is guided through the world of Vichy France, where lives are irrevocably shaped by the twin scourges of war and the black market. Rich in moral complexity and empathy, with several twists too good to spoil, it is grand, big-screen adult entertainment at its finest.
www.farewellmrhaffmann.com.au