Would you like to be in Jacques Chirac’s skin?

The film’s poster seems to ask: is Chirac schizophrenic?

"It’s not a cruel film — but it’s realistic. It’s tender towards the man but cutting towards the politician," said Patrick Brody, 51.

"It fits the idea I had of Chirac: lots of gaffes. He seems kind of out of it — but underneath it all he’s not a bad guy," agreed Pascal, 45.

Shaking hands with a dog

From his first steps as a politician in the 1960s, the young Chirac is shown as a suave operator, tirelessly criss-crossing the country to canvass voters and shake hands with anyone in sight — even once with a dog.

Using television clips spanning four decades, it shows him fighting his way to power with unflagging determination — and pokes merciless fun at the policy U-turns that have earned him the nickname "the weathervane".

"He should have been an actor," said the film’s co-director, the television satirist Karl Zéro. "As a young man he had great looks — a true heart-breaker — and he believed in absolutely nothing."

"Unfortunately for France, he chose politics."

Produced by the Oscar-winning team that made ‘March of the Penguins’, the film is the latest example of what the left-wing newspaper Libération calls "Chiracophobia: the new national sport".

Earlier this year, the best-selling book ‘The Tragedy of the President’, by political journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert, blamed Chirac for a national drift into inertia, division and debt.

Funny. But fair?

Though movie audiences seemed conquered, the press was more divided on the film, the first to lampoon a serving French president.

"Delicious", wrote the popular newspaper Le Parisien, "although in fairness what politician would survive such a treatment?"

Creator of what he likes to call the ‘docu-marrant’: Karl Z