Paris. They were just playfighting.

That was French President Emmanuel Macron’s explanation Monday for video footage that appeared to show his wife, Brigitte Macron, pushing him away with both hands on his face as they disembarked their plane to begin a Southeast Asia tour this weekend.

The brief moment quickly made headlines in France, with media outlets trying to interpret the interaction caught on camera through the newly opened plane door. The website of daily newspaper Le Parisien ran the headline: “Slap or ‘squabble’? The images of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron disembarking in Vietnam trigger much commentary.”

Macron later told reporters the couple, married since 2007 after meeting at the high school where he was a student and she was a teacher, were simply joking around.

“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” he said, adding that the incident was being exaggerated into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”

In a video taken by The Associated Press upon their arrival in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday, a uniformed man opens the plane door, revealing the president inside, dressed in a suit and talking to someone off-camera.

Two arms in red sleeves reach out and push Macron away, one hand covering his mouth and part of his nose while the other rests on his jaw. The French leader recoils, turning his head aside. Then, apparently realizing the cameras are rolling, he breaks into a smile and gives a small wave.

In subsequent footage, Macron and his wife, who is wearing a red jacket, appear at the top of the stairs. He offers his arm, but she declines. They walk down the carpeted stairs side by side.

The French leader argued the footage and the reaction to it underscore the dangers of misinformation in the social media era.

He said that in recent weeks, other videos had been twisted into false stories claiming he took cocaine with the leaders of Britain and Germany, when he said he was just picking up a tissue, and that he had a tense encounter with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — when they had actually been shaking and holding hands.

“Everyone needs to calm down,” he said.

His office also downplayed the interaction.

“It was a moment when the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around. It was a moment of complicity. That was all it took to fuel conspiracy theorists,” his office said.

Brigitte Macron, née Auzière, was a married mother of three when they met at his high school. A teacher, she supervised the drama club where Emmanuel Macron, a literature enthusiast, was a member.

He moved to Paris for his final year of high school but promised to marry Brigitte. She later moved to the French capital to be with him and divorced before they married.