Money makes you crazy: Liliane Bettencourt, the richest woman in the world, on Netflix

Simone Meier

This is the story of a mother who did not love her daughter. And a daughter who only wanted the best from her mother. Namely their money. This is the story of the two richest women in the world. Liliane and Françoise Bettencourt. When her mother Liliane died in 2017 at the age of 94, her fortune amounted to 36 billion euros. She is the eleventh richest person in the world. And the richest woman. Today, daughter Françoise is 70 years old and owns 80.5 billion.

What made her rich was L’Oréal, the cosmetics company run by Liliane’s father Eugène Schueller, a man whose business was particularly good because he successfully collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and financed the anti-Semitic terrorist organization Comité secret d’. action-revolutionary. One of its members was future president François Mitterrand. Another was the later Senate member André Bettencourt.

Schueller appointed Bettencourt his son-in-law, and no one objected to his continuing to write anti-Semitic pamphlets. But then Françoise, Liliane and André’s daughter, married the grandson of a rabbi who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1984 and converted to Judaism. Grandmother Liliane is suddenly afraid that her grandchildren may look too Jewish.

Françoise is Liliane’s only attempt to have offspring with André; the result is not clear to her; she finds her daughter clumsy and socially unacceptable. Moreover, the love between her and André has been dead for a long time. Luckily for her, another man comes into her life – and it’s exactly like season two’s “White Lotus,” where quixotic multi-millionaire Jennifer Coolidge falls in with a pair of gays who prey on desperate super-rich women.

It is 1987, the French actress Arielle Dombasle (in the Netflix documentary she calls herself “Artiste”) introduces Liliane to the gay photographer François-Marie Banier, who is 25 years her junior. Banier, a dazzling man who often photographs major stars for the covers of major magazines, takes relaxed, cheerful, aesthetic photos of Liliane. He becomes her best friend.

She feels relieved and in return gives him generous gifts, art, money, over the years they become bigger and bigger, in the hundreds of thousands, in the millions, within twenty years she will have given him almost a billion euros. He is not the only beneficiary, but he is the largest.

And that’s where the Netflix documentary ‘L’Affaire Bettencourt’ begins, which unfortunately only consists of three parts. Anno 2007. The perspective that director Maxime Bonnet chooses is unusual, efficient and also cost-saving. In the reenacted scenes his camera is always on the ceiling. On the ceiling of Liliane’s villa or on the ceiling of Françoise’s apartment.

It gives a certain satisfaction to be able to look down on these perversely rich people for once, it creates an emotional distance, Bonnet gives us no chance for sentimental pity for the poor rich women. You can’t look at the actors’ faces from above, they are pure shadows and they don’t have to talk. You just have to highlight.

All the dialogue we hear in the Bettencourt house is real and comes from a tape recorded by Liliane Bettencourt’s oh-so-loyal butler. It was Françoise’s idea because in 2007, shortly after her father’s death, she heard from a servant that Liliane planned to adopt Banier and make her an additional heir. She lets the butler spy on her mother, she now has two goals, surpass Banier and eliminate her mother, in this family the battle is almost as tough as in “Game of Thrones”. In line with the advertising slogan “L’Oréal: Because I’m worth it”. With emphasis on ‘I’.

The butler delivers more than twenty hours of recordings, but the least of these worries Banier, because Liliane prefers to receive him in the bedroom rather than in the drawing room, where the recording device can be hidden unnoticed. Without meaning to, Françoise catapults her family into one of the biggest scandals France has ever seen.

What the recordings contain are conversations between Liliane and her asset manager, who specializes in tax evasion, about accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein and about the ownership of an island in the Seychelles that used to belong to the last shah. And it concerns huge, illegal donations to conservative politicians, especially Nicolas Sarkozy and his Minister of Economic Affairs Eric Woerth.

The case against Sarkozy, which began at the end of his term, will be concluded in 2013. And at the big trial in 2015, Banier initially received the harshest sentence of all, but after the reopening of the trial he only had to pay a symbolic compensation of one euro to Françoise. In 2016, Françoise herself was accused of bribing her key witness, her mother’s former accountant, with 300,000 euros. The suggestion for this process comes from Banier.

It is clear from the butler’s recordings that Liliane Bettencourt became increasingly obedient and forgetful. Françoise saw her chance and after countless tests, the doctors actually diagnosed the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Françoise managed to eliminate and isolate her mother from the outside world in her final years to such an extent that she died in 2017 as a confused, lonely woman. And Françoise became the richest woman in the world.

“L’Affaire Bettencourt” tells those who know nothing new. The family history, the recordings, the process are known, it could be told in more detail and more carefully, there are still more questions. Why did Banier need all that money when he was a hugely successful photographer himself? For the uninitiated, however, the triptych is an extremely cleverly composed, astonishing gateway to the French real-life version of ‘Succession’. Except that the Bettencourts’ story is even crazier, sicker and colder than that of Logan Roy and his brood. It’s a look into the kind of madness that only too much money can unleash.

PS: Arielle Dombasle, who together with her husband, the publicist Bernard-Henri Lévy, owns an estimated 300 million euros, is “furious” about the documentary and has already sent a warning to Netflix. She expressed the opinion on camera that it was a production that would show respect for the Bettencourt family and was now confronted with a “complete lack of objectivity”. Of course, that’s how you see it if you belong to France’s super-rich elite.