Deux vies... plus une (2007) - film review

Eliane Weiss, a primary school teacher, finds herself increasingly put upon by the demands of her job, her husband, her daughter and her overly possessive mother.  She ought to be happy but, as she approaches her fortieth birthday, she feels that something is missing in her life.  One day, she meets a writer, Jeanne Sfez, who encourages her to realise her life-long dream.  On impulse, Eliane buys a laptop computer and begins to compose her first novel from jottings she has made in numerous notebooks over the past decade.  She begins to lose heart when her manuscript is rejected by several publishing houses.  But then she meets a publisher who appears to be interested in her work - or is he more interested in her...?

For her first feature, budding director Idit Cebula chose a subject dear to her heart, how women with a busy family and professional life face up to the inescapable trauma of midlife crisis.  Although the subject will doubtless be a familiar one to most French film aficionados, Cebula gives her film the personal touch by drawing on her own experiences and by injecting a healthy dose of off-beat humour, which includes a few bizarre excursions into the surreal.   Cebula, herself an established actress, puts in a fleeting appearance as a successful writer.   What the film lacks in depth it just about makes up for in charm, although some obvious flaws in the screenplay will have you grating your teeth in frustration (Cebula will have us believe that buying a laptop computer is as shockingly eventful as coming out to your children or admitting to being a rabid baby-eating Satanist).   What saves the film and prevents it from being an inconsequential vanity project are the contributions from the two principal actors, Emmanuelle Devos and Gérard Darmon, whose on-screen rapport breathes life into the still-born scenario and brings an authenticity and depth which is lacking elsewhere.

This is Devos’s third collaboration with Cebula - she previously appeared in the director’s two short films À table (1998) and Varsovie Paris (2002).  Over the last two decades, Devos and Darmon have emerged as two of France’s most versatile screen actors, both embracing a wide variety of roles, ranging from lightweight comedy to intensely serious drama.  Despite the obvious difference in their ages, Devos and Darmon actually look as though they are a couple in this film, that they really have been together twenty years.  Both actors deliver sensitive and humane performances that anyone who has experienced midlife crisis will recognise as informed and genuine.  Darmon’s attempts to cope with Devos’s increasingly irrational behaviour as menopausal angst takes hold of her have a tragic hopelessness and you feel for both characters as their world is upended by a nasty case of hormonal imbalance.   Deux vies... plus une is not a particularly profound film, and occasionally it is downright silly, but on the strength of the Devos and Darmon’s performances it has little difficulty holding our attention and offers an honest and poignant reflection on that irksome forty-year itch.

© James Travers 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?