La Vie d'une femme

A surgeon’s steady hands conceal a life on the verge of slipping out of control. With LA VIE D’UNE FEMME, Charline Bourgeois Tacquet confirms her gift for finely drawn female characters, crafting an intimate, unsentimental study of ambition, desire and emotional reckoning. Gabrielle, a 55-year-old maxillofacial surgeon, has built her existence around competence, discipline and self-sufficiency. The arrival of Frida, a young novelist observing her at work, hints at the possibility of another life. Bourgeois-Tacquet sidesteps the familiar grammar of the midlife-crisis narrative, favouring accumulation over catharsis. At the film’s heart is Léa Drucker’s extraordinary performance, charting Gabrielle’s subtle shifts without ever smoothing out her contradictions: fiercely authoritative at work, curt with colleagues, wryly ironic with her husband, hesitant with Frida and suddenly vulnerable in the face of her mother’s cognitive decline. Mirroring her heroine’s restless rhythm through supple pacing, finely judged mise-en-scène and expressive cinematography by Noé Bach, Bourgeois-Tacquet shapes a lucid meditation on the cost of self-mastery and the fragile freedoms won when certainty finally falls by the wayside. (Maria Giovanna Vagenas)

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet: JOUJOU (2016, K), PAULINE ASSERVIE (2018, K), LES AMOURS D’ANAÏS (2021)