A woman in a man’s world: La Banquière, money, transgression and the world of high finance

Abstract

Money and finance, although central in our everyday life and crucial to the making of a film, are seldom the central topic of films. French cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s offers some significant mainstream films centring on the world of money and high finance, at a time when the value of money, since the severance of the gold-exchange standard in 1971, is no longer aligned to that of gold. This article focuses on La Banquière and the way money, finance and their representation inform the story and the film’s aesthetic choices. An historical drama inspired by the life of Marthe Hanau, a bisexual and pioneering Parisian banker of the 1920s, who became the source of one of the major financial and political scandals of the Third Republic, La Banquière features Romy Schneider in the lead role. A box-office success, the film is unique in showing a woman in a position of economic and political power. Just as in other films about the invisibility of large-scale transactions, money, when visible on screen, usually as banknotes or cheques, is bad money, the sign of a transgression of some kind, leading, paradoxically, to terrible consequences. This article offers an understanding of money represented on screen through the theoretical work of Jean-Joseph Goux.