How to be a Good Wife

How to be a Good Wife, translated in French as La bonne épouse, begins with a title card informing its audience that in the late 1960s schools for good housekeeping (an institution in which this film is set) were ubiquitous and, ultimately, soon to be redundant with feminism on the rise. The film is set in Alsace, France in 1967, and the film cuts a wide swath across 1967 to get to its conclusion where the characters of the film confront the wider dissent of their native France, embarking on a journey to Paris where real-life protests occurred in May 1968. 

But in the meantime, the film stars Juliette Binoche as Paulette Van der Beck who, along with her husband Robert, have run the Van der Beck’s School of Housekeeping and Good Manners for 2 decades, creating perfectly honed housewives out of malleable teenage girls. If you think the timing of the Van der Beck’s latest intake of young women is inauspicious given the period setting, you would be correct – many of the young women are depicted as terrifically opposed to the concept of housewives, and far more open to exploring ideas of female sexuality and equality. In a time where women are expected to be subservient as a matter of fact, the young women’s dissent is radical, but ultimately continually stifled by Binoche’s Paulette, alongside her sister-in-law Gilberte (Yolande Moreau) and the ex-Resistance nun Marie-Thérèse (Noémie Lvovsky), who act alongside Paulette in the tutelage of these young women.

That is, until a tragedy occurs when Paulette’s husband Robert suffers an untimely death, and Paulette’s life is turned upside down. Afterwards, Paulette looks inward for the first time seemingly since becoming a housewife herself, and starts to see the value in living life for herself, rather than for her husband and partner. Not to mention, Paulette is reunited with her long lost love André (Édouard Baer), and when Paulette begins to allow herself to desire the thing she wants for the first time in a long while, her life begins to change for the better, making it increasingly difficult for her to continue to usher in good conscience the young women at the Van der Beck’s School of Housekeeping and Good Manners towards a life of housewifedom. 

Just in time for the Paris riots, which is where the film’s characters are headed in the film’s ultimately flashy and sycophantic conclusion. Paulette embraces wearing trousers over skirts, Gilberte gives herself a much-deserved (owing to the applause received by the fellow characters) makeover, and Marie-Thérèse screams for equality of the sexes, as they head towards Paris on foot after their bus breaks down. That most of these characters are in stark political opposition to the ideologies that they espouse in the film’s climax for most of the narrative seems to besides the point. 

How to be a Good Wife appears to have intended to catch lightning in a bottle, of a time where women were discovering their right to choose, behave, and politicise themselves, but it certainly loses its way getting there, and has already spent too much time reminding us of their oppression instead for it to feel meaningful or earned. Although entertaining at times, and Binoche delivers a charming turn as Paulette, the film doesn’t earn its stripes by the end, eliciting instead the question of whether the film instructs as its title suggests, or merely leaves you wanting. 

How to be a Good Wife 
In cinemas Saturday, 26 December 2020
www.palacefilms.com.au/howtobeagoodwife