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Critics Consensus: A Woman's Life offers absorbing, powerfully acted period drama that's further elevated by brilliant work from director/co-writer Stéphane Brizé.
Critic Consensus: A Woman's Life offers absorbing, powerfully acted period drama that's further elevated by brilliant work from director/co-writer Stéphane Brizé.
All Critics (48) | Top Critics (11) | Fresh (39) | Rotten (9)
Credit to Stéphane Brizé for an impressive piece of filmmaking with a refreshingly contemporary approach.
Guy de Maupassant's first novel, about a trusting French noblewoman who follows her husband and then her grown son into financial ruin, gets a slow, sensual, impressionistic treatment from director Stéphane Brizé.
We warm to Jeanne's plight not because it is so relatable or familiar, but rather because every turn feels so vivid and so enveloping.
Brizé pays more attention to the tasteful costumes and the alluring settings than to the drama or the images.
The rare period piece that feels observed rather than pretended, Stéphane Brizé's "A Woman's Life" finds the prolific French filmmaker applying his ruggedly naturalistic style to some very different source material.
The woman, Jeanne (Judith Chemla)... 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.
Perhaps not literally, but in Stephane Brize's depressing A Woman's Life, there are fleeting moments here and there of feeling and situations that all women can emphasize with.
The significance of some recurring images...only crystalizes as events unfold. The accumulated detail of the period recreation feels uncomfortably authentic.
The narrative is suffused with subtle yet piquant moral commentary.
A Woman's Life poses an interesting question: can a film be forgiven for being dreary and plodding if it is trying to accurately depict an existence defined by these adjectives?
It is an ambitious production but requires a fair amount of patience.
The movie's all-round realism -- bolstered as it is by Judith Chemla's excellent lead performance and Stéphane Brizé's intimate direction -- is deeply absorbing.
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