Potiche

The script has been closely adapted from a stage play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy, the writing team whose two dozen boulevard farces include the original Gallic versions of “Cactus Flower’’ and “Forty Carats.’’ The title is French slang for “trophy wife,’’ and the 67-year-old Deneuve makes for a deliciously naive Candide in the opening scenes, jogging through the sunny woods and cooing at the deer, lovebirds, and mating bunny rabbits.

Yes, Ozon’s playing games with genre and tone again, just as he did with the rapturous mystery-musical “8 Women’’ (2002), the kinky existential thriller “Swimming Pool’’ (2003), and the tongue-in-cheek melodrama “Angel’’ (2007). As originally written in 1980, “Potiche’’ is a frothy comedy in which Deneuve’s Suzanne Pujol takes over the management of her husband’s umbrella factory after the workers strike; she proves to be the sunny but firm Mama Courage everyone needs. “The Feminine Mystique’’ it’s not, but in its giddy fashion the story strikes a light blow against the patriarchy.

Stylistically, Ozon dials the project a few years further back, to a time when sitcom artifice ruled popular culture. The title credits feel borrowed from “Love American Style,’’ the soundtrack music from a Leonard Goldberg made-for-TV movie circa 1972. The collars are big, the hair bigger, and the film’s colors pop like a rainbow of vinyl raincoats. (Not for nothing does the factory’s product evoke Deneuve’s sunniest, saddest movie, 1964’s ageless “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.’’)

Within this plastic fantasy, the actors cavort for our — or is it their own? — amusement. Fabrice Luchini turns Suzanne’s husband, Robert, into a caricature of a rat bourgeois exploiter, cheating on his wife and workers with the entitled nastiness of a vaudeville villain. Judith Godrèche and Jérémie Rénier stake out strident right-wing and supportive left-wing positions as Suzanne’s daughter and son, and Karin Viard gets some laughs as Robert’s secretary-mistress, who slowly realizes that she would rather side with the sisterhood.

The biggest surprise in “Potiche’’ is the appearance of Gérard Depardieu as Babin, the town’s socialist mayor, whose support of the strikers is complicated by a romantic skeleton in his closet. The scenes between the two stars are fascinating. Depardieu is the Massif Central of French movie stars in more ways than one, and by now he’s big enough to blot out the sun. Yet Deneuve airily dominates the film just as Suzanne leads Babin and her husband by the nose.

“Potiche,’’ in other words, is a star vehicle in which the star is everything and the vehicle is nearly an afterthought, and only a legend extending her time on film with pleasure and grace could make that worth your while. What the movie utterly fails to resolve is what François Ozon is up to here and where he’s going next.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.