'A Woman's Life' director’s poeticism is overly protracted

( Unrated ) ( Monitor Movie Guide )

'Life' is set in the Normandy countryside in the first half of the 1800s and is based on Guy de Maupassant’s first novel, “L’Humble Vérité,” or “The Humble Truth.'

|
Courtesy of Michael Crotto/Kino Lorber
Swann Arlaud and Judith Chemla star in 'A Woman's Life.'

The French film “A Woman’s Life,” set in the Normandy countryside in the first half of the 1800s, is based on Guy de Maupassant’s first novel, “L’Humble Vérité,” or “The Humble Truth,” a much better title for this movie. The woman, Jeanne (Judith Chemla), is too singular to stand in for all women, and she’s certainly humble. And yet her life, which director Stéphane Brizé and his co-writer, Florence Vignon, follow for 27 years from the time Jeanne is 20, is unavoidably representative. Her afflictions are both symbolic and intensely personal.

The convent-educated daughter of a low-level baron (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and baroness (Yolande Moreau), Jeanne is content puttering in the farmlands of the estate occupied by her family and frolicking with the housemaid (Nina Meurisse) with whom she grew up. When she is introduced to Viscount Julien de Lamare (Swann Arlaud), the family’s new neighbor and an aristocrat of modest means, her parents impress upon her the need to marry him, although, somewhat anomalously for the time, they don’t command the union. They want her to love him, too.

The brief courtship of the couple, leading up to the wedding night, is presented by Brizé in the glancing manner that characterizes the entire film. A boat ride together in shimmery sunlight, Jeanne looking pensively out of a mansion window, a brief marital sex scene in which she stoically endures his attentions – all this is conveyed in a matter of minutes. 

It takes Jeanne longer than it does us to recognize Julien’s caddishness. He berates her for burning too much firewood in the home, even though it is she who is confined within it most of the time while he gallivants about. His dalliances are exposed, and the local cleric coaxes Jeanne to forgive him. Later on, another priest pressures her to expose Julien’s adultery to the husband he has cuckolded, with tragic results. (The film, following De Maupassant’s lead, no doubt, exhibits an unstressed but prevalent anti-clericism.) Jeanne, who has given birth to a baby boy, endures a life of protracted hardship, as first her mother, on whom she doted, dies, followed by her stern but not unreasoning father, who held things together.

Because Jeanne is mostly passive throughout, Brizé attempts to dramatize her inner state by both the somewhat pretentious use of alternately sunny and sodden flashbacks and flash-forwards, and voice-overs, which, in their grandiosity, do not really match the rather mum and docile woman that we see. (In her cheerier moments, Jeanne speaks of “a patch of blue sky and hope in one’s heart” and says of herself, “You are a daughter of light.”) There are a few too many shots of Jeanne looking thoughtfully through rain-battered windows while a pianoforte tinkles on the soundtrack.

Chemla has an expressive face and she’s photographed lovingly, in a way that would probably have caught the attentions of the great French Impressionists, but ultimately she is more of a sculptural presence than a fully fleshed-out protagonist. Because the film is told entirely from her vantage point – there is not a scene in which she does not appear – Brizé’s fine-tuned poeticism can seem overly protracted. It is only in the film’s latter stages, when Jeanne is increasingly bereft and drained of what little money she has by her deadbeat son, that we can see how tribulation has deranged this woman.

Jeanne is no Madame Bovary, though. She may be stripped of her innocence in an indifferent universe, but the film provides, in its way, a happy ending of sorts. “Life,” we are told, “is never as good or as bad as you think.” Grade: B- (This movie is not rated.)

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to 'A Woman's Life' director’s poeticism is overly protracted
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2017/0505/A-Woman-s-Life-director-s-poeticism-is-overly-protracted
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe