‘A Woman’s Life’ Cannes Review: The Discreet Anxiety of the Bourgeoisie

There is a kind of film the French seem to make almost from muscle memory, eyes half-closed. I’m thinking of a particular strain of urban, realist, bourgeois drama — contemporary characters, recognizable predicaments, the texture of actual life rendered with confidence and craft. Styles and registers vary, of course, but within the first few shots of La vie d’une femme you know you’re in capable hands. Capable, at the very least, and very sure of what they’re doing.

The director of Anaïs in Love steps fully into that tradition with the story of Gabrielle (Léa Drucker), a woman in her mid-fifties who runs the maxillofacial surgery department at a public hospital in Lyon. She is widely respected — her work consists largely of reconstructing faces after severe accidents or illness — and she moves through the operating room as though it were her natural habitat, which in every meaningful sense it is. Outside its walls, things are considerably harder to manage. Other people have other ideas.

The film unfolds in short thematic episodes, each one illuminating a different facet of Gabrielle’s life. Her marriage to Henri (Charles Berling) is quietly falling apart. There are tensions with his children from a previous relationship — she chose not to have her own. Her elderly mother (Marie-Christine Barrault) is deep in the fog of Alzheimer’s. An unexpected romantic possibility materializes. And the hospital, because this is the twenty-first century everywhere, is facing budget cuts. Gabrielle moves through all of it — and then some — at a pace that allows no room for pause.

One could reasonably conclude that this is a film about «white people’s problems», and perhaps it is. When Gabrielle and Henri decide to try living apart, there happens to be another apartment available. When her mother’s care becomes complicated, she simply pays whatever it takes to secure better arrangements. And so on. That said, A Woman’s Life does manage to capture something true about the experience of professional women of a certain age — the permanent, overlapping pressure of it, the sense that there is always one more thing demanding attention before the last one has been resolved.

The title, deliberately open-ended, makes the point plainly: this is what a woman’s life looks like, or can look like, right now. Not that Gabrielle’s existence is unrelentingly grim. Her tentative friendship — or something more — with Frida (Mélanie Thierry), a novelist who embeds herself in the hospital to research a book, brings moments of genuine warmth and pleasure. And her relationship with Henri is, one charged scene aside, notably civilized for a marriage in the process of dissolving. But nothing stays solved for long. One problem recedes and another moves in to take its place. That’s life, as someone’s aunt would say.

Drucker is ideally cast, her directness and lack of sentimentality perfectly suited to a woman who meets chaos head-on rather than flinching from it. She is especially strong in the hospital scenes — the staff meetings are sharply observed, as is her dynamic with her assistant Kamyar — and later, in quieter moments that require Gabrielle to look at herself with an honesty she rarely applies to her own interior life. In those scenes, Bourgeois-Tacquet reveals someone who, beneath all that competence and composure, has never stopped being vulnerable. The space between those two things — the projected strength and the private fragility — is what this solid, thoroughly French bourgeois drama is finally about.