‘A Woman’s Life’ Review: Léa Drucker Seals Her Status as One of France’s Best Actresses in This Perceptive Portrait of a Surgeon at a Crossroads
The bracing romantic screwball Anaïs in Love (2021) marked the arrival of Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet among the growing ranks of French female directors giving their national cinema a vigorous dusting-off — an honor roll including Mia Hansen-Love, Justine Triet, Rebecca Zlotowski, and, with The Little Sister (soon to be released Stateside), Hafsia Herzi.
Starring Anaïs Demoustier as an irrepressible Parisian grad student who steamrolls her way into and out of affairs, the film was the standout of that year’s Cannes Critics’ Week. Now Bourgeois-Tacquet has a slot in the festival’s competition, though A Woman’s Life (La vie d’une femme) is the kind of intimate, modestly scaled Gallic movie likely to be greeted with some sniffiness about whether that promotion was premature — as if a Cannes competition entry simply must be a magnum opus-level swing for the fences.
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A Woman's Life
The Bottom Line A buoyant and affecting character study. Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)Cast: Léa Drucker, Mélanie Thierry, Charles Berling, Laurent Capelluto, Marie-Christine-Barrault
Director: Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
Writer: Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, with Fanny Burdino
1 hour 38 minutes
But while it isn’t the major artistic stride that a swift upgrade to the main event might have augured, A Woman’s Life is, in its own way, something almost as gratifying: an elegant, enjoyable sophomore outing that proves the breakout was no fluke.
Bourgeois-Tacquet’s elevator pitch — unforeseen circumstances lead Gabrielle, a workaholic 55-year-old surgeon, to question her life choices — isn’t exactly earth-shaking, and the film lacks the propulsive spontaneity that made Anaïs in Love such an off-kilter delight. That’s partly a reflection of the type of protagonist A Woman’s Life is dealing with: Gabrielle is as grounded — or “rational,” to borrow her word — as Anaïs is flighty. Still, there’s an unmistakable safeness here — a sense that the writer-director is never pushing beyond the familiar contours of a certain slice of contemporary French cinema, complete with customary storyline staples (extramarital affair, ailing parent, career crossroads) and stylistic moves (pacy editing, soundtrack packed with lively classical piano, chapter headings divvying up the narrative).
And yet, when coloring within the lines yields a second consecutive character study this buoyant and perceptive, it feels churlish to complain too much. Particularly with a lead like Léa Drucker — so fantastic in Catherine Breillat’s recent Last Summer — delivering another performance of riveting nuance, feeling and wit.
Written by Bourgeois-Tacquet and Fanny Burdino, A Woman’s Life opens with flashes of Gabrielle in panting mid-coital close-up — a clear indication we’re in that recognizable realm known as French Cinema. The following scenes show Gabrielle, the tireless, talented chief of facial reconstruction surgery at an underfunded Parisian hospital, in her default mode: racing through a quotidian gauntlet of medical, administrative and personal challenges both major and minute, all while griping about the ineptitude of everyone else.
Simultaneously good-humored and ill-tempered in that quintessentially French fashion, Gabrielle is indeed shouldering a crushing amount of responsibility. In addition to her daily schedule of operations and consultations, there are interns to train and a clinic renovation to oversee. Her longtime surgical partner and confidant, Kamyar (Laurent Capelluto), is about to go on paternity leave. Tensions with her husband (Charles Berling) are flaring over the fact that his grown kids are still living, and partying, at home. (Gabrielle doesn’t have biological children of her own.) Her mother (Marie-Christine Barrault, wonderful) has Alzheimer’s and requires round-the-clock care.
Gabrielle is so fearsomely self-sufficient, so adept at juggling, pivoting, and tending to everyone and everything, that — you guessed it — no one really tends to her. Nor do the people who populate her world seem duly dazzled by her ability to rein in its chaos; they’re not just dependent on her virtuosity — they’re accustomed to it. In a way, the formidable Gabrielle has become invisible, even to herself.
That status quo is jolted by Frida (Mélanie Thierry), a writer who comes to observe Gabrielle at work as research for her upcoming novel. The experience of being watched by Frida in the operating room, of being appreciated and admired by this younger woman, awakens something in Gabrielle. And when Frida’s interest seems to go beyond the, um, strictly professional, Gabrielle, after a moment’s resistance, gives in to it.
Any French film buff will easily intuit how this all unfolds. But if A Woman’s Life is missing the spark of surprise that powered Anaïs in Love, it nevertheless deepens nicely, building out Gabrielle’s outer and inner worlds with darts of sly humor and sweeping brushstrokes of melancholy. This is, in a broad sense, a story of serial heartbreak — of the inevitable sacrifices, trade-offs and losses we endure in life, and which no measure of achievement or privilege can protect us from. More specifically, the film suggests, it’s women like Gabrielle — of a certain age, highly accomplished — who are especially susceptible to this kind of regret or second-guessing.
But Bourgeois-Tacquet is scrupulous in not denying the character her agency. Gabrielle isn’t a “victim,” as she insists, and her occasional swells of anger seem triggered less by the impossibility of “having it all” than by the assumption that she would want to have it all in the first place. Beneath its breezy surface, the movie is grappling with these knotted questions of gender, choice, ambition and identity — just like Gabrielle, hurtling through her day, is constantly negotiating competing urges, figuring out how to wrest meaning from her existence.
One of the pleasures of the film — of today’s French cinema in general — is the delicious multi-dimensionality of its female protagonist. Like numerous Gallic screen heroines before her, Gabrielle skates the line between brisk and brusque, with patience bordering on zero and phone etiquette most charitably described as “perfunctory.” She suffers no fools, certainly, but she can also be rigid and unfair with those closest to her. When Kamyar, her co-department-head and dear friend, broaches his upcoming parental leave, Gabrielle’s response is one part scoffing to ten parts guilt-tripping.
But if Drucker refuses to round off her character’s spiky edges, she never overplays her toughness. Gabrielle’s unflinching competence and dynamism belie acute sensitivity, and the actress allows hints of child-like hurt and hesitation to pierce the carapace. Much of the film’s drama stems from this supremely empowered woman being confronted with the fact that she needs, and wants, other people, too.
The supporting characters are more functional than fleshed-out, perhaps not unfitting for a portrait of someone like Gabrielle, a force of purpose and passion who has the effect of making those around her feel inessential. Berling’s Henri, especially, suffers from the film’s disinterest in anyone aside from its central figure; a key scene between him and Gabrielle lays out their history in clumsy expository snippets. Capelluto’s Kamyar — the colleague with whom Gabrielle shares both a long professional history and tender personal chemistry — and Barrault’s impaired but sharp-tongued Arlette are more compelling, partly because the movie conveys the idiosyncrasies of their relationships to the protagonist without spelling them out.
Frida is the most significant secondary figure — the person who tempts Gabrielle away from her trajectory, making her pause and ponder roads not taken. But appealing as she is, Thierry doesn’t have much to work with here besides Cheshire cat smiles and dulcet-toned come-ons. Gabrielle’s feelings for Frida are understandable in theory; the latter approaches her with fresh eyes and few demands, giving her space to be something other than problem solver extraordinaire. It’s too bad the film doesn’t take the time to make us feel in our guts what stirs Gabrielle so intensely in the younger woman, to probe their connection a bit more. (Contrast that to the giddy, goosebump-inducing romance in Anaïs in Love, with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi matching Demoustier’s magnetic capriciousness beat for beat — literally, in that knockout “Bette Davis Eyes” dance scene).
Working with DP Noé Bach and editor Clément Pinteaux, Bourgeois-Tacquet keeps A Woman’s Life moving with a crisp efficiency that mirrors Gabrielle’s own. But she knows when to slow things down, the camera advancing gently and tightening around Gabrielle to capture tiny shifts and turning points. The filmmaker rarely lingers, making brief moments of grace — like Gabrielle peeking in at her mom and stepdad taking a nap — all the more resonant for their evanescence. She also can turn it up, staging a swoony first-date sequence that finds Gabrielle and Frida swept into intimate proximity by an immersive dance performance.
Among Bourgeois-Tacquet’s strengths as a writer-director is her nimble way with tone and emphasis. A family meeting with a social worker about Arlette’s worsening dementia is a marvel of counterintuitive comedy, while Gabrielle’s huddle with a shell-shocked tongue cancer sufferer proves an unexpected emotional centerpiece. “Sometimes life is tough,” she tells the man, who is resisting the surgery that could save him. “And it’s always unfair.”
Those words might read as harsh. This is, after all, a doctor who tells her interns they won’t be remembered fondly when their residency is over. But Gabrielle’s manner with the patient is gentle, and by this point we recognize her statement as one of empathy, solidarity and profound, hard-won honesty. Such honesty is this flawed yet deeply human character’s defining quality — a gift she extends to the people around her, and, by the film’s end, to herself as well.
Full credits
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)Production companies: Les Films Pelléas, Versus Production, ARTE France Cinéma, Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes Cinéma, La femme qui aimait les films, Proximus, Be tv and Orange, RTBF
Cast: Léa Drucker, Mélanie Thierry, Charles Berling, Laurent Capelluto, Marie-Christine Barrault
Director: Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
Writers: Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, with Fanny Burdino
Producer: David Thion
Cinematography: Noé Bach
Editor: Clément Pinteaux
Production designer: Pascale Consigny
Costumes: Léa Forest
Casting: Youna de Peretti
International sales: Be For Films
1 hour 38 minutes
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