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A WOMAN’S LIFE | FILM REVIEW
***
Dir: Stéphane Brizé
Starring: Judith Chemla, Yolande Moreau
12A, 1hr 56 mins
A Woman’s Life shows symptoms of the main debilitating issues plaguing much modern French cinema (and British too, whilst we’re at it). It’s a certain obsession with politeness, of a cinema of small gestures and small moments, of respectability, but also of respectable craft. When the French New Wave exploded in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s, one of their primary causes of frustration was what they saw as a overload of respectable middle-class productions promoted by the French studios, that they called the “Tradition of Quality”. To a certain extent, French cinema seems to have reverted back to this “Tradition of Quality” against the DIY ethos of the New Wave, for better or worse, with a large number of French films exported to the UK in recent years remaining emblematic of this kind of respectable filmmaking. British cinema too, for the record, shows the same obsession, with tired Downton Abbey tropes plaguing major British productions – it’s hard to understand this country’s obsession with the costume drama as anything other than a collective desire to cure insomnia.
Yet, though it’s easy for me to turn my nose upwards towards any costume drama in my general vicinity, I confess that there’s much to appreciate in A Woman’s Life. It suffers from many of the issues common to the costume drama – a bone-dry stuffiness and the strain of having to make classical material relevant to modern audiences the most obvious amongst them – yet it elevates itself through the use of some exquisite camerawork, brilliant central performances, and an oblique, elliptical editing strategy which omits many of the major moments in the plot in favour of simply showing their aftermath.
The title of the film pretty much describes the plot, as we follow Jeanne (Judith Chemla), a 19th century aristocrat whose life is a series of (mostly bad) decisions, informed by the social conventions of her social strata. Her husband turns out to be a manipulative serial cheater. Her son, upon reaching adulthood, turns out to be financially inept, frittering away the family fortune. So it goes. Throughout, Jeanne weathers every storm with remarkable passivity. If anything, A Woman’s Life focuses purely on Jeanne lifelong inability to do anything about her problems, encouraged from birth to be meek and demure. A Woman’s Life is a forcible indictment on the behaviour expected from women in many circles.
At some point, the film’s commitment to misery becomes predictable, and it is overlong by a good half-hour. With that said, Chemla’s performance is utterly radiant. Director Stéphane Brizé has a brilliant eye for catching Chemla in just the right profile – shots as simple as the actress enjoying the sun on her face, or staring out of the window at the rain have a uniquely cinematic quality – and the film being shot almost entirely in close-ups with the boxy old-school Academy aspect ratio produces an intensely claustrophobic mood. It’s as if we are trapped in Jeanne’s pain, unable to distance ourselves. Flawed though it may be, this is an interesting and fresh attempt at breaking through the barriers and limitations of the often stale costume drama.
words FEDOR TOT
Out now in cinemas