A Woman's Life

Une vie, France/Belgium 2016

Director Stéphane Brizé (Mademoiselle Chambon, The Measure of a Man) applies his keen eye for social observation to costume drama with this striking adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s first published novel. A young aristocrat named Jeanne (Judith Chemla) raised and educated by kind, progressive parents seems poised on the brink of modern womanhood, but finds herself ill-prepared for a feckless husband and a pious, hypocritical society.

“The pathos and wonder of A Woman’s Life comes from its recognition that Jeanne is at once a captive of cruel circumstances and a wilful, intelligent human being. Her kinship with other 19th-century fictional heroines – Emma Bovary, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina – is evident. She suffers, but she also reads, thinks and desires, and strives to find a zone of freedom within boundaries dictated by fate and society…

A Woman’s Life… moves calmly and deliberately, but it never feels slow. Instead, its images and scenes are suffused by an intensity that seems almost to be a quality of the light and air as they play across Ms Chemla’s watchful, sometimes inscrutable features.” — A.O. Scott, NY Times