“Anaïs in Love,” the 2021 debut feature by writer-director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, was a sunny portrait of idealized French womanhood that turned cooler and stranger the longer you stayed with it: Its title character, outwardly a maddeningly winsome ingenue of a particularly Gallic stripe, revealed layers of insecurity and instability we didn’t see coming, and the film itself wound up with more to say than it initially let on. If it proved a small but deft exercise in finding a character from the outside in, however, Bourgeois-Tacquet’s meatier follow-up “A Woman’s Life” doesn’t try the same bait-and-switch: This time, the filmmaker’s subject is an older woman who knows exactly who she is, and bristles at anyone who won’t accept those terms.
“A Woman’s Life” is thus a film as different from “Anaïs in Love” as its star Léa Drucker is from the latter’s lead Anaïs Demoustier: direct and tough-minded rather than soft and capricious, but with a jaded wit and sexuality that warms up proceedings, giving verve and buoyancy to its depiction of cumulative middle-aged wear and tear. Premiering in Competition at Cannes — a major promotion for the filmmaker, whose debut bowed in the Critics’ Week sidebar — the film reinvents no wheels but its details are specific and rewarding.
If the title is somewhat mundane — and risks confusion with Stéphane Brizé’s 2016 Guy de Maupassant adaptation, which took the same English translation — it’s at least apt: With little affectation or grand thematic design, the film presents not just a well-shaded character but the rolling rhythm and clatter of her existence, with its day-to-day professional strains and spiraling personal choices. As a narrative, it’s never tidily shaped or resolved, and never dull either. “A Woman’s Life” invites comparisons to the holistic female portraiture of Mia Hansen-Løve, and if Bourgeois-Tacquet’s filmmaking hasn’t quite that degree of lyricism, it builds substantially on the airy promise of its predecessor.
The first of the film’s chapter headings — “I want it all” — seemingly alludes to the classic feminist ideal whereby career women also maintain order and control in the domestic sphere, though as it turns out, 55-year-old Gabrielle (Drucker) has little interest in that kind of perfection. A top maxillofacial surgeon at an eternally resources-strapped Lyon hospital, she takes fierce pride in her work above all else, including her loving, sometimes philandering and routinely sidelined husband Henri (Charles Berling). Though she tolerates her teenage stepkids with limited patience, children have never been in her life plan, and age has brought no regret on that front.
There is, however, a degree of passion missing from her private life, relative to the intensity with which she conducts her career. When young novelist Frida (Mélanie Thierry) asks to observe Gabrielle at work for research purposes, she’s newly self-conscious about how her life must appear from the outside, for better or worse. But Frida’s presence brings about a change of mindset in more ways than one, as the two women find themselves increasingly drawn to each other: A cross-generational queer affair is new territory for the good doctor, and for once she’s less than certain of how to proceed. (She does, however, briskly shoot down her husband’s reservations: In matters of adultery, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.)
Concurrently with this one leap into the void, however, everything else in Gabrielle’s life begins to fall disconcertingly out of place. As her mother Arlette (Marie-Christine Barrault, tensely moving), with whom she has a fraught relationship, slides irretrievably into Alzheimer’s disease, Gabrielle must assume responsibility for her care, and struggles to bring a doctor’s detachment to the task. Meanwhile, she falls out with Kamyar (Laurent Capelluto), her most loyal friend and co-worker, over the his application for two months’ paternity leave — an unprofessional indulgence to her mind, while he rails against her austerely sacrificial principles.
“Being unit head doesn’t keep a lonely woman warm,” he says, reverting to misogyny in the face of her rigid workplace zeal. Fully invested in its protagonist without blandly cheerleading for her, Bourgeois-Tacquet’s script is sharply attuned both to the everyday prejudice faced by women like Gabrielle, and the ways in which such sexism can be overcorrected. (Henri calls her “Robocop” with only moderate irony and affection.) Fresh from winning her second Best Actress César for Dominik Moll’s police procedural “Case 137,” Drucker essays another callused, bone-deep study of a woman sternly holding her own in a patriarchal sphere. But she gives Gabrielle a yearning sensual life too: a lighter, giddier physicality in the presence of Frida that shortens and stiffens in all other company.
The tone and tempo of Noé Bach’s excellent camerawork also varies according to which Gabrielle is on screen: At her most relaxed, the camera cozies up to her with dim, velvety languor, while in workplace scenes, she’s swept along in bright, rushing tracking shots, just one more piece of systemic machinery. At 99 minutes, “A Woman’s Life” is brisk and concentrated, but it never feels glibly selective with regard to its protagonist, permitting us access to Gabrielle at her most impressive, her most unbearable and her most disarmingly ordinary.
