A WOMAN'S LIFE Review

Film five of our second day at Cannes, and we arrived at A Woman's Life running on fumes and hoping for something that would justify staying awake. Léa Drucker delivered. She always does. The film around her delivered about two thirds of the way, which on a long festival day is more than enough to leave an impression.

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet's sophomore feature follows Gabrielle, a facial reconstruction surgeon in a crumbling French public hospital who is also, simultaneously, holding together her husband, his children, her aging mother, her sister, her nephew, her medical unit, and presumably the structural integrity of the building itself. The film opens with a lush, sweat-drenched sex scene that announces its intentions immediately: this is a woman who throws herself into everything completely. The question the film spends its chapters asking is what happens when there is nothing left to throw.

Drucker does not unravel. She cannot. That is the whole point, and she plays it with an interior precision that makes every held breath feel like a small act of survival.

The film is structured in chapters with titles ranging from the evocative to the bluntly declarative, and in its first half it has the texture of real life, loose and breathing and full. Gabrielle's work in facial reconstruction is genuinely fascinating material, a doctor who does not merely heal but transforms, sometimes permanently and not always for the better. The parallels to the film's larger concerns about identity and reinvention are not subtle, but they are earned, and Bourgeois-Tacquet handles them with enough lightness that they feel observed rather than imposed.

And then Frida arrives. A novelist researching a book about a female surgeon, she drifts into Gabrielle's operating theater and then, with a persistence that the film frames as mysterious, never quite drifts out again. Flowers arrive. Dance performances are attended. The book remains suspiciously unfinished. Mélanie Thierry plays her with a beautiful, unanchored ease, a woman entirely unburdened by the kind of obligations that structure Gabrielle's every waking hour, and that contrast is clearly the point. Gabrielle is consumed. We understand why on a theoretical level. We feel it less than the film needs us to.

The first half is a great big breathing thing. The second half narrows with its protagonist, which is honest but also, occasionally, frustrating to inhabit.

The film's second half is where it loses some of its grip, as Gabrielle's obsession with Frida crowds out the vivid, overstretched world the film had so carefully built. We understand the logic of it. Obsession is narrowing by nature. But watching a woman as capacious and capable as Gabrielle reduce herself to a single fixation is a difficult thing to sustain dramatically, especially when the object of that fixation remains slightly opaque to us throughout. The disappointment of the resolution feels intentional and true to life. It also lands with slightly less force than it should.

What carries the film through these wobbles is Drucker, who has become one of the great portrayers of women holding themselves together by force of will alone. She is not performing a breakdown. She is performing the thing that comes before a breakdown, the long sustained tension of a person who has given everything to everyone and is only now beginning to ask what remains for herself. It is a performance of extraordinary restraint and it deserves to be seen.

Five films in on day two. We are tired, and the Croisette is dark, and this film left us with something that is sitting with us still. Not everything. But something.

On a day this long, that counts.

🍿 SCORE = 65/100