‘Handbook of the good wife’, a colorful French comedy

If something caught the attention of ‘Two Women’, the previous film by Martin Provost (‘Violette’), it was its powerful lead duet. Veteran actress Catherine Deneuve and her extreme elegance shared a shot with Catherine Frot, her bright face in ‘The Idiots’ Dinner’. Both established artists offered the best part of a film not suitable for the insensitive, which pulled drama and comedy to move the public. A story of transformation starring two women who met along the way and discovered that they could complement each other, each filling the void of the other. ‘Handbook of the good wife’, the new bet of the French filmmaker, opens this weekend in these parts with a similar claim, the interpretative power of the Oscar-winning Juliette Binoche, surrounded by a choral cast without waste, to dialogue with humor about gender equality.

‘Handbook of the good wife’, as its title suggests, well met (the good wife originally in French), presents a married couple who run a school for housewives. Its main objective is to teach good behavior and servility to a group of young people so that, in the not too distant future, they will become the ideal women in the patriarchal home, with the rag and the apron. When the husband of the protagonist couple dies without warning, his sorrowful better half has to face a bankrupt business. In the midst of economic chaos, existential rethinking came to her, also driven by the thought revolution in May 68. Thus, she joined forces with her students to free herself in an act of commendable sisterhood. Accepting conjugal duties goes to another plane. The widow without a nail discovers the pleasures of life without submission. You can take care of the house while you are free, with your family or alone. A bold, happy and talkative proposal, with a main cast in a state of grace.