Deneuve’s reign continues in the hilarious Potiche

In French, a potiche is a person somewhere between a trophy wife, a status symbol and a puppet figurehead. In fact, nothing could be further from a truthful description of Catherine Deneuve in her latest film, Potiche, a hilarious look at the politics of sex and work in 1970s France.

Based on a ribald crowd-pleaser of a play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, director Francois Ozen lovingly restores a world of mass strikes, Farrah Fawcett flick hairstyles and tracksuits, while simultaneously poking fun at it all.

Deneuve is the eponymous 'potiche' who is given her chance to prove her worth when her husband becomes bed-ridden after an accident during a strike at his umbrella factory. Enlisting the help of the town's communist mayor (Gerard Depardieu), with whom she once had a fling, she sets out to show that sometimes all you need is a woman's touch.

This is a "vibrant period pastiche", writes Anna Smith in Empire. "It's both an inspiring tale of female empowerment and a jolly good laugh."

Critics are in universal agreement that Deneuve is almost regal in her sublimely spot-on depiction of the penned-in housewife. Although there is little effort at psychological depth, remarks Roger Ebert for the Chicago Sun-Times, and most characters merely "float along on the requirements of comedy", Deneuve displays "effortless skill".

The coincidence of it being an umbrella factory, recalling her role in the 1963 musical film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, is not lost on the critics.. But while that was the film that first made her famous, Potiche could be said to succeed partly because she is famous.

Depardieu brings significant weight to the character of Maurice Babin in his eighth film alongside Deneuve. Although this is hardly ground-breaking stuff, the two monuments of French cinema make an eminently watchable duo.

For David Jenkins at Time Out, the film succeeds mainly because "the performers understand the 'wink-wink' nature of the material," which is stacked with "bawdy zingers and pointed political barbs".

"Francois Ozon is alert to the story’s camp elements and exploits them shrewdly," agrees David Gritten in the Daily Telegraph, praising the film as "funny and giddily enjoyable".

Others, however, were less impressed with Ozen's failure to rework the material of the original play.

"He is fond of the past, indulgent of its foibles and covetous of its stuff," says A O Scott in the New York Times. The film is carried by the professionalism of Deneuve, Depardieu and others, he adds, but it could have been sharper had Ozen dared to make certain revisions rather than simply act as "collector of knick-knacks and trophies".

Quibbles aside, however, Potiche is an "arch, knowing and self-aware" film, says the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. For filmgoers unwilling to subject themselves to yet another comic book remake, this very funny and very French film is the perfect antidote. It opens tomorrow, June 17. ·