How to Be a Good Wife

How to Be a Good Wife (La Bonne Épouse, 2020) is a French comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Director Martin Provost assembled Juliette Binoche, Yolande Moreau, and Anamaria Vartolomei for a story set in a provincial housekeeping school on the eve of May 1968.

Paulette Van der Beck has spent two decades teaching teenage girls to iron, cook, and defer to their husbands without question. Her husband dies suddenly. The school turns out to be bankrupt. Outside the windows France is coming apart — students in the streets, women demanding rights, everything Paulette built her life around suddenly obsolete. Her first love walks back into the picture. Her stepsister Gilberte is cheerfully ignoring every convention. Even the stern nun Marie-Thérèse starts cracking.

Provost plays it as farce but sneaks something sharper underneath: the comedy of a woman who built her whole identity around a role that history just made redundant. Binoche's deadpan is the whole engine of the film. Stream How to Be a Good Wife (2020) online on iFILM.