The film might be called The Commissioner, her Dentist, his Son, her Bodyguard and her Driver. They are just a few of the friends for whom Edith Cresson found high-paying, low-work jobs in Brussels.
Perhaps it is easy to be generous when one is earning £12,300 a month for attending one meeting every Wednesday . . . The screenplay would be written by Elisabeth Schemla, the French journalist who also went on Ms Cresson's Brussels payroll and the author of her aptly titled biography, The Trapped Woman.
Ms Cresson, the 65-year-old former French prime minister and European Commissioner for Science, Research and Education, will go down in history as the woman who dragged the entire 20-member EU Commission down with her. In two decades in public office, Ms Cresson showed a special talent for unhappily mixing her personal relationships and her work, and for making enemies.
When the Socialists came to power in 1981 her mentor, President Francois Mitterrand, made her agriculture minister. She went to war with French farmers, whom she called "prehistoric animals". They threw mud at her designer suit. As minister of foreign trade and then junior minister for European affairs, she earned the enmity of leading fellow Socialists including Michel Rocard and Pierre Beregovoy.
In 1991 Mr Mitterrand made Ms Cresson France's first woman prime minister. The French were delighted for a few days, until she gave her disastrous general policy speech in the National Assembly. To the horror of French feminists, the Bebete Show satirised Mr Mitterrand's sexual pursuit of the puppet he called "the bird".
As prime minister, Ms Cresson enraged the Japanese by saying they lived like ants and British men by alleging that one in four of them was a homosexual. One of her most fervent detractors in the EU Parliament, the British Labour MEP, Mr Michael Tappin, is said to have avenged the insult by helping to bring down the Commission.
Not surprisingly, Ms Cresson lasted only 10 months in the prime minister's office. Her eminence grise there was an adviser named Abel Farnoux, who used to boast that he ran the country while "Edith makes the coffee". Rene Berthelot, the dentist who accompanied her to Brussels at the beginning of 1995 - for whom she obtained a bogus £4,819 a month job as a "scientific visitor" - was also known as her "guru". He prepared Ms Cresson's astrological chart and boasted that "Edith can't get along without me".
By the time the dying Mr Mitterrand sent his former protegee off to Brussels to console her for her failed career in France, she had set up a company with Mr Farnoux to provide technical assistance to east European countries. On arriving in Brussels, she saw no conflict of interest in demanding the job of Commissioner for Eastern European Affairs.
When Ms Cresson was instead given the portfolio for Science, Research and Education, she demanded - again without success - one of two Commission vice-presidencies on the grounds that she was a former prime minister.
In her appointment hearing before the European Parliament, she stunned MEPs by wrongly asserting that education was not to be part of her job. Later she referred to her fellow commissioners as "gnomes", campaigned in favour of French nuclear testing in the South Pacific and showed visceral hatred of the Belgian Commissioner for Competition, Mr Karel van Miert.
A tiny Belgian newspaper, la Meuse-la Lanterne, first broke the story of mismanagement and favouritism in the Commission last September. Ms Cresson's hiring of Dr Berthelot was mentioned only in passing, and the President of the Commission, Jacques Santer, pleaded with her to remain silent.
But she insisted on replying publicly, which led to Europe-wide press coverage and finally to yesterday's mass resignation. In the intervening months, Ms Cresson attempted to intimidate the press with lawsuits.
Her case is not unlike that of another Mitterrand crony, the President of the Constitutional Council and former foreign minister, Roland Dumas, who had his mistress hired by the state-owned oil company Elf Aquitaine at a cost of tens of millions of francs to French taxpayers. The motto of the Mitterrand era was "Never confess, never resign", and both have adhered faultlessly to it.
Some French commentators see Ms Cresson's fall as the result of a clash between easy-going Latin cultures and more puritanical Protestant northerners. But as the recent blood trial and the Dumas and Paris town hall scandals show, the French, too, now expect their politicians to be clean and responsible.
There was not one voice to defend Ms Cresson yesterday. The Socialist Justice Minister, Elisabeth Guigou, said the Commission had done the right thing in resigning. Francois Hollande, the secretary of the Socialist Party, said the resignation was "proof of the vitality of European institutions".