You must love theater as one of the roots of cinema to enjoy the trickery of François Ozon’s The Crime Is Mine (Mon Crime). This ingenious satire was adapted from a vintage stage piece, Mon Crime by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil, that was the basis of Hollywood’s screwball comedy True Confession, starring Carole Lombard in 1937. It’s Ozon’s way of addressing today’s social crises — incessant lawfare and fake news, all of it compacted into this brilliant, perplexing farce.

A theater curtain rises on 1930s Paris, where struggling actress Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) is charged with the murder of a handsy movie producer. She’s acquitted, helped by her roommate, struggling lawyer Pauline (Rebecca Marder). But their defense gains troubling notoriety. Ozon goes back almost 100 years to spoof #MeToo audacity — whether the Christine Blasey Ford accusations, the Harvey Weinstein trials, or the current persecution of actor Gérard Depardieu in France. These scandals permeate Ozon’s standard provocateur procedure, undermining sanctimonious political certainties — especially mainstream media’s gender favoritism.

The Crime Is Mine is a farce without villains (like Buñuel’s deliberately theatrical The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie). Madeleine, Pauline, and the Parisians they encounter represent a discombobulated culture. Ozon lightheartedly implicates us in scandalous absurdity. By stylizing the pleasures of farce, Ozon revives its moral tradition.

Ozon’s dizzying courtroom narratives parody personal vendettas and witch hunts. Madeleine and Pauline test the possibilities of finding love and success (“le beau marriage”), while exposing society’s misandrist and misogynist pretenses. The Molière tradition comes alive through such expert farceurs as Fabrice Luchini, playing a punctilious magistrate; an unexpectedly suave Dany Boon as a bon vivant; and a showstopping turn by Isabelle Huppert as the ultimate theatrical diva who covets Madeleine’s renown.

Madeleine goes from her casting-couch audition to a courtroom soliloquy before an all-male jury (“through you to your wives, sisters, daughters” accusing “the desire and power of men”). It’s as manipulative as Alice Diop’s Saint Omer but suggests the craftiness of Hillary Clinton’s maenads and gorgons. Through newsreels of notorious Charlotte Corday (the revolutionary who assassinated Marat in 1793), the murderous Papin Sisters (subjects of Jean Genet’s The Maids), and the patricidal Violette Nozière, viewers may recall such mendacious females as Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Deborah Birx. Ozon exposes role-playing, as when Madeleine appears in a sympathetic stage production titled Suzette’s Ordeal.

This vibrant caprice reminds us of the beauty of vanished ideals. We yearn for their revival. Make Cinema Great Again. “We live in terrifying times, read the papers!” says a flamboyant prosecutor. The shock of seeing courtroom mockery revives tradition rather than destroying it. Madeleine’s role in The Bitter Tears of Marie Antoinette, filmed at a guillotine, suggests how corporate media’s travesty of J6 show trials on network TV put us through a modern version of the French Revolution’s Jacobin Terror.

Although overloaded, labored, and zingy, Ozon’s stylization jumps from political satire to sexual subversion — as when comely Madeleine and Pauline bathe together à la Jean Auguste Ingres’s 1863 painting The Turkish Bath. Western culture from Molière and Ingres to Buñuel and Fassbinder taught Ozon how to be ironic.

Ozon’s tour de farce illustrates what we dread knowing: that celebrities, politicians, even police officers and functionaries, will lie under oath when it suits their career purposes and pleases their egos. It’s a crime we share through Huppert’s Sarah Bernhardt parody, suffused with the spirit of theatrical diva-hood. Mad yet pragmatic, she’s imperiously dotty, giving off the scent of a prototypical feminist, a fragrance older than Chanel No. 5. It’s a virtuosic turn. The Crime Is Mine won’t likely be celebrated as it deserves — it’s a sophisticated alternative to Poor Things — but Ozon restores the culture deliriously.