On October 29, 2025, Isabelle Huppert reunites with Thierry Klifa for the film The Richest Woman in the World, a dramatic comedy presented out of competition at Cannes: the journey of a French billionaire, Marianne Farrère, whose empire falters upon encountering a brilliant artist played by Laurent Lafitte. In France, where the action unfolds, the film examines gifts, secrets, and clan wars, using fiction to question power, money, and boredom.
The Mask of Power, the Trouble of Desire
The French actress Isabelle Huppert returns to the forefront with The Richest Woman in the World, a dramatic comedy by Thierry Klifa freely inspired by a major French social and judicial chronicle. The actress portrays Marianne Farrère, a billionaire hidden behind heavy curtains and the well-oiled mechanics of a household where every gesture is a ritual. The entry of a flamboyant artist, Pierre-Alain Fantin, played by Laurent Lafitte, cracks the cushioned order of this private kingdom. The film will be released in France on October 29, 2025. It aims to explore mutual enchantment and dizzying gifts. Furthermore, it addresses the intimate explosion that pushes the family to the brink.
The shadow of a famous affair looms, but the story embraces its fictional aspect. Names change, situations shift, irony mingles with drama. The Richest Woman in the World was presented out of competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival (Cannes). It then continued its journey through French events, where cinephiles and the curious gather. Klifa’s promise is summed up in one sentence: to illuminate, through the detour of laughter and acidic elegance, our relationship with money, power, and boredom, when boredom is no longer a void but a gentle weapon.
A Silent Heroine, a House Full of Secrets
Huppert, seen in The Piano Teacher, portrays a woman withdrawn behind etiquette and the calculated slowness of an heiress. Marianne guards her rituals like a border. She loves terse phrases, silences according to the mood of the day, this polite way of keeping the world at a distance. The encounter with Fantin changes everything. The man arrives full of certainties, disguised with flair, convinced that provocation is the first word of a poem. The film gradually unfolds the ramifications of a private castle. A butler listens, while a daughter suspects. Moreover, legal advisors are on high alert. Finally, there are gifts whose figures are dizzying.
The screenplay, written by Cédric Anger, Jacques Fieschi, and Thierry Klifa, plays with social theater without losing sight of the impending sentimental collapse. The dialogues are sharp, the story progresses through shifts and breaks, sometimes through those direct-to-camera looks that disrupt convention and bring a draft of documentary air into the padded salons. One senses prepared confidences, communication strategies, stories where truth and imagination exchange their colors.
A Trio of Actors on the Attack
Laurent Lafitte plays with a mix of grace and cynicism. His artist, Pierre-Alain Fantin, seduces because he holds the fire in his hand. He allows himself a noisy fantasy but knows the fatigue and fear of losing the upper hand. Moreover, he feels the need to stay within the frame he disrupts. Marina Foïs, as Frédérique Spielman, a lucid and warrior-like daughter, brings the film’s moral tension. She refuses the mother’s confession, accumulates evidence and innuendos, never giving up on the idea that scandal will save her from injustice. Raphaël Personnaz and André Marcon complete the ensemble, one with nervous fervor, the other with a counterpoint of weary authority.
Klifa knows how to direct dialogue. He gives the Huppert–Lafitte duo the breadth of a variation. She freezes, he leaps. She cuts with a flick of the wrist, he unfolds a theory of gestures. Together, they draw a dance where consent circulates, where domination changes sides several times in the same scene. There is no stupidity or Manichaeism, but angles and impulses. Furthermore, there are interests that advance and retreat.
Social Farce, Intimate Drama: A Matter of Rhythm
The cushioned staging plays with salons, corridors, and antechambers. Surfaces shine, curtains slow the light, muffled footsteps sound like a score. Klifa interweaves banter and bite. The social farce is never gratuitous. It prepares the ground for a domestic drama where people tear each other apart in low voices. Then, they learn to shout in the corridors of justice palaces. The comedy keeps an eye on cruelty, the drama relies on dry irony. The fleeting balance is maintained by the art of editing by Chantal Hymans and the photography of Hichame Alaouié, which finds the true violence of interiors in muted tones.
The music by Alex Beaupain does not seek emphasis. It outlines a level of temperature, maintains alertness, and lets the voices drive the story. One smiles spontaneously at a protocol detail. However, the next moment, one discreetly feels the collapse of family loyalty. The overall pace is that of a comedy of manners that slides, step by step, into a heritage drama.
"It’s a Fiction": The Necessary Obviousness
The film constantly reminds us of its fictional status. Names are changed, dates shifted, places reinvented. Marianne Farrère is not a filmed double of a famous billionaire. Pierre-Alain Fantin is not a key portrait of a media artist. The story paints a general picture of the passions money unleashes and the defenses it sharpens. Then, it shows the interpretations each person projects to hold their story together. In this way, The Richest Woman in the World keeps its distance from the files. It allows itself the freedom of invention.
This precision does not detract from the subject’s burn. Klifa subtly raises a question of responsibility. What do we offer when we give everything? What do we demand when we claim to be dispossessed? On what scale do we measure gratitude? The film does not judge. It illustrates how words contract. At the same time, love and vanity successively borrow the same costume. Moreover, debt, tenderness, and weariness also adopt this common disguise.
The Huppert–Lafitte Duo, Lines of Force
The film’s charm also lies in a form of attack play. Huppert has a sense of long time, a way of installing emotion after the fact, like a returning scent. Lafitte plays the counter-rhythm, the sudden appearance. Their many shared scenes become spaces of experimentation. One hears the dry music of a romantic confrontation. Furthermore, the jubilation of a well-maintained misunderstanding is felt. Additionally, the quiet pain of a dependency is also perceptible. In these moments, The Richest Woman in the World finds its center of gravity.
One then remembers that Klifa loves sharp-edged performers and choral ensembles. From The Family Hero to The Kings of the Track, he works on the balance between lightness and melancholy. Here, he adds a satirical touch reminiscent of 19th-century engravings but swaps the pen for a camera that gets close to faces until it captures the tiniest lies.
Heritage, Power, Freedom: A Courteous Tyranny
Everything in the film returns to the three poles that govern the story. Heritage first, not as simple transmission but as a moral contract. Huppert plays a woman for whom fortune is not a sum but a family narrative, a framework of values and prohibitions. Power, both vertical and cordial, is expressed through an economy of gesture. Moreover, it also manifests through financial decisions. Freedom finally, both claimed and impossible. The freedom to love without calculation, to give without justification, to reinvent oneself when everything seems already written.
The film wisely avoids moralizing. It stages silent negotiations and intimidation rituals. It shows a class that speaks softly and weighs every word. Indeed, words commit millions and, more importantly, lives indebted by common memory. Violence never explodes; it insinuates itself.
A Cannes Presentation, the Test of the Public
Out of competition at Cannes 2025, The Richest Woman in the World had its first round of honor. Indeed, this happened before its autumn release. The public discovered a double-edged story. On one side, the jubilation of a satirical look at the codes of a world where domesticity is as much about money as style. On the other, a judicial and family chronicle that gains momentum as the scenes unfold. The Cannes selection, by breaking down expectations, served the film: everyone sought the thread that suited them, the social farce or the intimate wound.
Out of competition at Cannes 2025, The Richest Woman in the World had its first round of honor. Indeed, this happened before its autumn release. This reception launches a public debate upon its theatrical release. The film addresses the modern era, its dizziness, and its fatigue. Moreover, it explores the confusion between transparency and surveillance, which fuels all disputes.
A Harmonious Team
In the shadow of the trio of actors, the technical team supports the score. One perceives the science of the sets by Ève Martin. Furthermore, the precision of the accessories transforms them into evidence or lies through their over-presence. One admires the sobriety of the lighting, the care of the costumes that dress ease like a second skin. Nothing screams; everything holds.
This restraint serves the fable. Klifa films doors that open too slowly, glances that dare not, outdoor smiles surprised by an indoor anger. The camera does not pretend to know everything. It records a grammar of power, observes pacts, exhibits renunciations. The viewer reads between the lines, eventually choosing a side, then becoming wary of it.
A Word of History, for Memory
That the affair which distantly inspired the film left mental traces is beyond doubt. But the strength of this work is to avoid illustration. The past is not a dossier to be reconstructed. However, it is a national legend that cinema uses to tell the psychology of a milieu. Here, justice, when it appears, becomes an additional theater. Lawyers adjust the punctuation. Judges, when they appear, do not deliver a truth. They put a provisional end to a battle of narratives.
This shift frees the fiction. It allows the moral question that remains to be heard. How to love in a world saturated with advice, interests, and gazes? How to preserve dignity when money makes everything visible and exchangeable? How to accept aging when youth is bought, rented, and invited to dinner? Then, it leaves in the early morning. It leaves a scent of storm and victory.
And Now, the Theater
The French release, on October 29, 2025, will give this cruel comedy its true stage. It will reflect the national fascination with grand money stories. Moreover, it will reveal the anxiety over the permeability of private and public. It will showcase an art of acting that, with Huppert, becomes writing and, with Lafitte, controlled provocation. It will recognize the elegance of a director who prefers poise to a flashy gesture.
It should be discreetly reminded that everything here is fiction. Characters, names, and situations are invented, and any resemblance is merely a reading effect.
At the moment of turning off the light, we will know that the film neither asks us to love nor to condemn. It offers a listening. It observes a woman who refuses penance. Moreover, it sees an artist confusing desire and conquest. Finally, it notices a girl who does not give up. The Richest Woman in the World tells this old story that always begins again: money creates fictions, and fictions teach us to look at money.