La Femme de ma vie (1986) - film review

Simon was once an acclaimed virtuoso violinist, before he became a alcoholic and sank into the mire of depression.  His life is ruined, and even his wife Laura can do nothing for him.  Then Simon meets Pierre, who has gone through the same personal crisis as him and found a way out.  With Pierre’s help, Simon begins to make a recovery.  But Laura sees in Pierre a rival whom she can barely tolerate...

Régis Wargnier, the director who would go on to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar with his epic Indochine (1992), made an auspicious feature debut with this viscerally intense portrait of a man battling against alcoholism.  La Femme de ma vie exhibits little of the grandeur of Wargnier’s subsequent films but it is nonetheless one of his most accomplished works, a worthy recipient of the 1987 César for the Best First Film.  A critical and popular success, the film also received four further César nominations, for each of the four principal actors (Christophe Malavoy, Jane Birkin, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominque Blanc).

Largely through Malavoy’s stand-out performance (no doubt one of the best of his career), the film offers the most harrowingly convincing account of a man (Simon) struggling to overcome his alcohol dependency.  Simon’s personal struggle is poignantly reflected in the lesser crises of the people who surround him, in particular his guilt-ridden wife Laura and a former alcoholic keen to offer him support (superbly played by Jane Birkin and Jean-Louis Trintignant respectively).  Making her film debut is Dominique Blanc, an actress of exceptional talent who almost steals the film with her arresting portrayal of a woman who has literally reached the end of her tether.   Blanc would take the lead in Wargnier’s next film, Je suis le seigneur du château (1989), and had a supporting role in Indochine (1992).

The one other notable name in the credits is Elsa Lunghini, who had made her film debut a few years earlier in Claude Miller’s Garde à vue (1981).  Here, the talented 13-year old gets to sing the song T’en va pas which was subsequently released as a hit record.  The song reached number one in the French pop charts and made Lunghini an overnight star, under the name Elsa.  La Femme de ma vie may have launched three very successful careers but the main reason for watching it is that it is a captivating piece of film drama in its own right, a sensual and sensitive work directed with suprising maturity by a first-time filmmaker and performed with exquisite veracity by a superlative cast.

© James Travers 2012

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