It has been ten years since Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, in which Isabelle Huppert’s Michèle Leblanc and Laurent Lafitte’s Patrick formed one of the most unusually complex and strangely enchanting onscreen relationships in recent memory. A decade later, they reunite in Thierry Klifa’s The Richest Woman in the World. The film arrives at the French Film Festival UK from its Cannes Out of Competition premiere and attempts once again to capture the essence of a complex and uncanny relationship, only to result in a rather uninteresting effort.

Inspired by the story of Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers and the Bettencourt affair surrounding the L’Oréal heiress, The Richest Woman in the World follows Marianne Farrère (Huppert), the billionaire head of the Windler Group and the titular, ‘richest woman in the world’. She meets Pierre-Alain Fantin (Lafitte), a charming photographer and dandy. They form an unusual relationship. Pierre-Alain, being an unsuccessful artist, offers amusement and intellectual stimulation. Marianne, by virtue of being the richest woman alive, offers her wealth. To a degree, this dynamic resembles that of a patron of the arts and their artist, particularly in its non-sexual nature.

Meanwhile, Marianne’s daughter Frédérique (Marina Foïs) becomes increasingly alarmed by Pierre-Alain’s growing influence over her mother. In a desperate state, frustrated by her inability to make Marianne happy in the same way Pierre-Alain can, she decides to intervene and put an end to the relationship. Added to this already chaotic situation is the revelation of the family’s Nazi past, despite Frédérique being married to a Jewish husband. Marianne’s husband Guy (Andre Marcon) also harbours intimate feelings for their handsome butler Jérôme (Raphaël Personnaz).

On paper, this could have been something genuinely interesting and complex. The Bettencourt affair is a story that can be told from multiple perspectives and with great nuance. It is disappointing that Klifa chooses one of the most banal ways to approach it, focusing primarily on L’amour. As Pierre-Alain and Jérôme remark several times, the rich, despite their ridiculous wealth and luxury, are ultimately just normal people. Klifa’s approach to humanising them is therefore to drag the story into a soap operatic melodrama that imagines how banal these wealthy individuals can be.

By shifting the setting from the 2010s to an ambiguous late 1980s or early 1990s, the film loses the socio-economic and historical context essential to this family. Their business strategy is reduced to a single remark stating that they do not follow the trend. Although there are brief mentions of tax evasion, offshore accounts, and connections to government officials, nothing about the material structures of Marianne’s wealth is explored, except demonstrating how negligible a few million euros are to her when gifting Pierre-Alain. The same applies to the Nazi thread, which is introduced but never developed beyond being a backdrop to the relationship.

Even considered purely as a story about a complex relationship, The Richest Woman in the World struggles. Much of its more than two hour runtime is devoted to emphasising how dull and square Marianne’s family, especially Frédérique, can be, contrasted with how wild, lively and fresh Pierre-Alain is. The film provides little beyond that. There is no substantial insight into Pierre-Alain’s intentions or background, nothing about the broken relationship between Frédérique and Marianne, and what caused the banality of the family dynamic that pushed Marianne away from them. Instead, the film repeatedly shows how amusing Pierre-Alain can be. By going as far as using loud ‘sex soundtracks’ to illustrate his ruthlessness, this supposed attempt to humanise the rich simply reinforces spectacle and stereotypes often applied to other groups, particularly the queer community in media representation.

Although fiction does not need to be realistic or objective, it still requires internal coherence. One scene shows Pierre-Alain introducing Marianne to Betsy, another divorced woman, inside a gay bar. As soon as Betsy starts singing, the loud diegetic music abruptly switches to her song in a way that feels unjustifiable even within the film’s own already unrealistically crazy logic. The film’s time period is also confusing. In one scene Huppert reads from her smartphone, while in others characters rely on television for news and use Walkmans for music, as if the director never made up his mind.

Cinema often captures the pulse of its time and its grand themes through intimate and personal journeys. However, this cannot be achieved by focusing solely on l’amour. It requires far more effort, design and rigour. While French films such as Age of Panic (2013) share a similar chaotic energy and emotional messiness, they also show that it is possible to achieve genuinely thought provoking social commentary through such a messy journey. Sadly, these qualities are largely absent from The Richest Woman in the World.

Screened as part of the French Film Festival