First-time feature director Léa Domenach smartly casts Catherine Deneuve as Bernadette Chirac, wife of conservative French president Jacques Chirac, who served from 1995 to 2007, in a mild satire about how Bernadette, a strong-willed woman, asserted herself after being increasingly marginalized… by Jacques himself. Deneuve’s effortless elegance—including her Karl Lagerfeld couture—says more about the intersection of image and substance than Domenach and Clémence Dargent’s scattershot script manages to.

Domenach slyly opens the film with a church choir singing the onscreen exposition (“This story is loosely based on the life of Bernadette Chirac.”) as Bernadette walks past them and enters a confessional. It’s a good, impish joke to start with—but one the director leans on too often, returning to the gag a few more times, including near the end, when the choir performs an aria from Carmen.

The script’s premise is that Bernadette must adjust to her new role as France’s first lady, especially since she’s sidelined by both her husband, Jacques (a dour Michel Vuillermoz), and her daughter, Claude (a humorously exasperated Sara Giraudeau), who also serves as the president’s assistant. At first, Bernadette is a punch line—even among the president’s aides. When Claude tells her to wear more modern clothes, she retorts, “I won’t become hip.” Of course, that’s exactly what happens, thanks in part to the advice from her put-upon assistant Bernard Niquet (a nicely understated Denis Podalydès), who evolves from chilly subordinate to trusted ally. Upset that she’s seen in public wearing outdated clothes, designer Lagerfeld (an exuberant Olivier Breitman) gives Bernadette a full-blown fashion makeover.

After Diana, Princess of Wales’s fatal car crash in Paris, President Chirac is nowhere to be found—until he’s tracked down at his Italian mistress’s place. (This detail is conjecture on the screenwriters’ part, but it makes for a moderately compelling moment.) The resulting embarrassment—especially for Bernadette—spurs her to act, as does her horror at witnessing Jacques’s longtime chauffeur, Yvon (Lionel Abelanski), relieving himself on her beloved turtle in the presidential palace garden. (Bernadette later exacts hilarious revenge on Yvon—between them, there was never any love lost.)

Bernadette launches a charm offensive, heading to Corrèze—her husband’s political base—to connect with citizens, who are captivated by her wit and style. The press eats it up, but Jacques and Claude are furious—she’s upstaging the president. They scramble to rein her in, especially after she hosts Hillary Clinton for a meeting in which neither of their husbands is present. Watching the encounter unfold on television, one aide quips that the two women are bonding over their serially unfaithful spouses.

Domenach strives to keep the tone light, even when more serious matters surface, but the result is a film with a pervasive weightlessness. Even Bernadette’s defiant support for Nicolas Sarkozy (a nondescript Laurent Stocker)—framed as the least terrible option for her husband’s successor—is played for easy laughs, with Jacques fuming as he watches her warmly greet the man they once both mistrusted.

Still, Deneuve is a delight throughout. Her deadpan delivery hovers between bemusement and elegance as Bernadette charts the tricky path from loyal wife to cultural icon. Deneuve, unsurprisingly, wears haute couture like second skin—but even her glamour can’t elevate The President’s Wife beyond an amusingly slight concoction.