OVERVIEW
Gabrielle, 55, runs the maxillofacial surgery department at a public hospital in Lyon. She rebuilds faces wrecked by accidents and cancer, and manages staff and equipment shortages. Outside the hospital, there is a husband (Charles Berling), an aging mother (Marie-Christine Barrault) sliding into Alzheimer’s, and a domestic life built around taking care of other people, despite her conscious choice of not having children. When a novelist named Frida (Mélanie Thierry) walks into the ward to research a book, thirty years of carefully balanced obligations begin to come loose.
BACKGROUND
Bourgeois-Tacquet had two stated ambitions when she pitched this to her producer David Thion. She wanted to write a character who embodied “the courage to live bravely,” and she wanted to push back against the framing of fifty-something women as either outdated or victims. Five years after her debut Les Amours d’Anaïs sold to more than forty territories out of Critics’ Week, she returned with the same producer, same co-writer Fanny Burdino, and same sales agent Be For Films, this time building the film around Léa Drucker, who recently won her second Best Actress César for Case 137.
THE REVIEW
La vie d’une femme is a solid French mid-career portrait that proves once again that Léa Drucker can carry and elevate pretty much anything. The script offers little we haven’t seen before, yet Drucker remains so watchable, while shying away from her character’s flaws, that the result remains highly engaging.
Grabielle’s arc is worth the admission alone. It is interesting how, for a long time, she can’t even put a finger on what is wrong with her and what makes her unhappy. She has long blurred the line between what she tells herself and what she really wants. She clearly doesn’t work for the money, having kept working in public hospitals rather than going private, where she would earn far more and work less, something she would be scared of. She also doesn’t hesitate to offer to pay for an expensive retirement home for her mother, since money is what she can give without rearranging the rest of her life.
A telling scene has her informing a patient about a tumor developing in his tongue, becoming frustrated by his initial choice of avoiding surgery. How much of it is her simply trying to win, playing the game, choosing her words carefully, which will certainly scare him enough to opt for the surgery? Being good at her job has been her life’s priority, so she has to have that. Mid-surgery or reprimanding interns, she is in her wheelhouse and commands these scenes, making it clear that as long as she’s in control, everything is fine.
Told in an eleven-chapter structure that plays as a gimmick yet keeps the life’s episodes tightly organized, the film is particularly effective at capturing how entrapped she becomes by the cycle. It shines especially in scenes that have her pushed out of things she can control, like seeing her mother, played by Marie-Christine Barrault in a very affecting performance, slowly losing her soul as her Alzheimer’s gets worse. The most stressful hospital sequences are layered with loud sound effects of renovations and transit, a clever choice by Bourgeois-Tacquet to mirror Gabrielle’s state of mind as she edges toward losing it.
Yet it is in the affair with Mélanie Thierry’s character, Frida, that the movie actually breathes, as Gabrielle finally feels vulnerable. It becomes clear how much the relationship means to her, resulting in the film’s sweetest sequences as she throws herself further into it. She also tries to do what she does best and manipulate the situation, yet quickly learns that real love does not work that way.
FINAL THOUGHTS
La vie d’une femme is not a particularly memorable film, and there is no revelatory development. Still, a film about a 55-year-old woman who wants to figure out why her life isn’t great after achieving all she thought she wanted remains captivating, and Drucker plays it without any of the self-pity the role could have invited. Worth it for her performance alone.