“A delightful watch and yet again proof of Léa Drucker’s impressive talent”

For those of us who watch HBO’s hit show The Pitt, the opening of Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s La vie d’une femme, in which a hospital department head is followed around on a hectic day by both the camera and a writer who seeks inspiration for a new novel, is nothing new pace-wise. But whereas the TV characters rarely leave Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s emergency room, for Gabrielle (Léa Drucker) there is more to life than the operating theater; this is the portrayal of a woman’s life (the film’s English title), after all. The hospital is her life, but not her whole life. Her home situation is becoming complicated though, with her partner’s teenage son giving her little space to wind down after a full day of facial reconstructive surgery, keeping medical students in check, and dealing with budgets and a pending move of the department to another building. She and partner Henri decide to live apart, but not separate, to give Gabrielle a bit more breathing room. But her breath is about to be taken away by the novelist, Frida (Mélanie Thierry), who expresses her desire to see Gabrielle outside of her work, away from the new novel. Gabrielle is shocked, a little nervous, but also curious. She accepts Frida’s invitation to see a modern dance performance, but just when things start heating up she tells Frida no. It’s a temporary rejection, because some time later she accepts another invitation, this time to a mountain retreat where Frida is working on another book; this time Gabrielle gives in to the temptation, and the two women share a passionate night and a romantic tryst in the fresh air of the Italian Alps. It’s a carefree week, one of her happiest in quite a while, but life is about to become more complicated for Gabrielle.

Léa Drucker is rapidly becoming the next Grande Dame of Francophone cinema, elevating every film she is in in a way that only true greats like Isabelle Huppert and before her Catherine Deneuve were capable of (though neither could save Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales, also playing in Competition at this year’s festival). Bourgeois-Tacquet’s sophomore effort would be no doubt a lesser film were the heroine of her film in lesser hands than Drucker’s, who gives an outstanding performance across a range of emotions, from tough-as-nails in her role as department head to very fragile in the hands of Frida. Which isn’t to say that the director doesn’t have a hand in La vie d’une femme‘s strength as a character study who is forced out of the comfort zone of her work and her highly ordered private life. Bourgeois-Tacquet keeps the film moving at a snappy pace, very much in line with Gabrielle’s hectic life, but once sparks start flying in the crisp mountain air she slows down the film for a tasteful lovemaking scene and moments of romantic bliss besides an alpine lake. This stretch of the film also gives Thierry, an underrated actress, room to shine, although the initiating scene belongs to the novelist and poet Enrico “Erri” De Luca; his eloquent and philosophical monologue about the nature of life is one of the film’s highlights and gives this almost Assayassian part of the film (the reference here obviously being Clouds of Sils Maria) a breathtaking moment.

Bourgeois-Tacquet structures her film around eleven short chapters, which seems to be a trend at this year’s festival, with many directors either using days, dates, or simple titles to chop their film into bite-size pieces. La vie d’une femme does so with chapter titles like ‘Pity’ or ‘Loss of control’, each one of them instructive of what is to follow, and also a nod to the novelist structure that Frida’s work in the film might employ. By doing so it helps keeping the pace brisk, but at times creates a feeling of arrested development in the flow of the film, as if broken into pieces that don’t quite fit together again. The film makes frequent time jumps, which exacerbates the issue, leaving it to Drucker to hold it all together like a miracle glue; luckily the actress is more than up to the task. Through her performance and Bourgeois-Tacquet’s keen sense of mise-en-scène, La vie d’une femme is perhaps not a masterpiece or even a great film, but a delightful watch and yet again proof of Léa Drucker’s impressive talent.