The Richest Woman in the World: Thierry Klifa on fictionalising the Bettencourt Affair

In 2007, what became known as the Bettencourt Affair broke into the press and the French public got a glimpse into the life of the then world’s richest woman, L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

It was scintillating and nasty, and had all the ingredients of a most delicious scandal — a privileged old billionaire woman, a younger (platonic) companion, a put-out daughter who sued to gain control of the family wealth, political connections and, in 2010, secret recordings made by a former butler which revealed plots involving tax evasion, illegal payouts and Swiss bank accounts.

It even caught in its web the political fortunes of President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Like everyone else in France, filmmaker Thierry Klifa was captured by the Bettencourt Affair, and recognised its dramatic and cinematic potential. But he didn’t want to recreate it in documentary form.

“I understood that there was more than one truth, and I thought it deserved to be told from a different perspective, and a different truth, concerning the same event,” Klifa told The Nightly.

Klifa’s film, The Richest Woman in the World, is released in Australia this week. The character at the centre of it, played with aplomb by global luminary Isabelle Huppert, is named not Liliane Bettencourt but Marianne Farrere.

But the beats are very familiar. Marianne is the head of a multinational French cosmetics company she inherited from her father who has a sketchy past with the pro-Nazi fascists.

Her husband was a politician, her daughter Frederique has a much more demure and different personality to the mother, leading to a persistent distance between them.

And Marianne meets Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte), a cultured, brash and goodtime photographer who becomes Marianne’s companion, pseudo-son and beneficiary just as Francois-Marie Banier was to Bettencourt, and was rewarded, by some estimates, up to €1 billion.

The names have been changed and the timeline was contracted, but the similarities are unmistakable, right down to the film’s declarative title, The Richest Woman in the World (La Femme la plus riche du monde).

What Klifa wanted to portray was the emotional and social truth at the heart of the scandal, while maintaining the flexibility to tell a version of the story.

“It’s a very French story because this social class, which is high bourgeoisie, it’s typically French, Catholic and almost aristocracy,” he explained. “You hardly ever seen them on screen and it’s because they tend to hide themselves well in real life.”

Klifa described it as a cross between a comedy by Honore de Balzac and a tragedy by William Shakespeare.

He chose a comedic, almost farcical tone because the characters’ wealth is ridiculous by most standards, but there’s a sadness running through it because it’s also about a daughter who discovers her cold mother is capable of love, but it was just never for her.

Klifa and his co-screenwriters Cedric Anger and Jacques Fieschi combed through transcripts and documents of the real events for inspiration, and discovered that many of the characters were formed by their own words.

“There were so many situations that were a dream for screenwriters because they were so peculiar that they lent themselves to be adapted into a fictional story,” he said. “It’s the nastiness they have, and so it’s a dark humour that comes out of it.”

A comedic tone is key, and like American TV series Succession before it, Klifa is able to weaponise humour to stealthily embed emotional truth in between the absurdity.

“You would never make people identify themselves or feel empathy for the very wealthy on screen, it was impossible,” Klifa said. “So, I chose this different tone in order to tell the story and to show feelings.”

The other secret weapon, of course, was Huppert. For a lot of people in France and around the world, Huppert is a bigger name than Bettencourt, who died in 2017, was.

From the start, Klifa wanted “an icon to play an icon”, and had dreamt of working with Huppert.

“We’ve known each other for so long and I wanted to offer her a role that suited her genius,” he said. “She managed to give a lot to the character to the point of somehow deleting the real source of inspiration.

“She had her own interpretation of Marianne, and made us completely forget the true character that Marianne Farrere was drawn from. She managed to side-step it in a way.

“When I offered her the role to play the richest woman in the world, it was like offering her a role to play a superhero.”

The Richest Woman in the World is in cinemas from May 21