Potiche

Deneuve. Depardieu. Disco. What more do you need? Not much, if the point is to prove that Americans have no monopoly on great actors who’ve gotten rounder with age and soft enough to debase themselves with dated farce. To be clear: It is heartwarming to encounter plus-sized French movie stars, probably the last people in the world you’d expect to plump up. But the flabbiness of their material is less inspiring. In filmmaker François Ozon’s version of Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy’s 1980 play, Catherine Deneuve plays the resignedly domesticated late-1970s “trophy wife” of an uptight chauvinist umbrella tycoon (Fabrice Luchini), whose labor-relations calamity results in her taking over his business. She has help from a former lover and lefty politico played by Gérard Depardieu. It’s not for nothing that Ozon’s international breakthrough, in 1998, was a comedy called Sitcom. The fluffy feminism whipped up by Potiche seems almost immaterial in view of its brightly lit retro stylings and TV-ish music cues. But at least its stars still shine.