La Vie d’une autre (2012) - film review

Marie is 40, but when she wakes up one day she is convinced she is 25.  She has forgotten fifteen years of her life.  All she can think of is the great romance that lies ahead of her, but she soon discovers that this romance has long fizzled out.  The Marie of today is a successful businesswoman and the man she once loved has grown to despise her.  Unwilling to accept what she has become, Marie makes up her mind to win back the one love of her life...

Having proven herself to be a very capable actress and author of books, Sylvie Testud makes her directing debut with this offbeat comedy-romance, based on a novel of the same title by Frederique Deghelt.  Despite its implausible scenario and some hard-to-miss flaws on both the directing and acting fronts, La Vie d’une autre is an engaging little film that would doubtless have passed without comment were it not for the attention-grabbing casting of Juliette Binoche and Mathieu Kassovitz in the principal roles.  Neither actor is stretched by the subject matter but, by force of charisma alone, both elevate a humdrum comedy to a slighter higher level and, whilst their on-screen rapport is distinctly lacking in some crucial scenes, they do imbue the film with sufficient charm to distract us from the deficiencies of Testud’s directing and screenwriting.

The plot is contrived and fanciful to the point of absurdity, and gets increasingly hard to swallow as it goes on.  A young woman goes to bed with the man she has fallen in love with and wakes up to discover that fifteen years of her life have elapsed without her knowledge of it.  It is as if she has climbed aboard a time machine and has been projected into her own future, where she is naturally horrified to discover what she has become - a hard-nose executive type who has neglected her husband (maybe the plot would have been more believable if it had featured a time machine).  Just as in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the heroine is so appalled by this vision of the future that she immediately sets out to correct it.  And so, having dispensed with the clumsy plot artifices, the film can finally make landfall on sturdier territory, concluding in classic vein with a test of the durability of love, with some dodgy comedy crowbarred in by rent-a-gag to stop things becoming too sweet and mushy.

Unhappy over some of the details in the original novel, Testud took it on herself to largely rewrite it for her screenplay, and this is presumably where it all began to go wrong, and why she had such difficulty persuading Binoche to take on the lead role (at first the actress declined the part).  A weak screenplay does not necessarily mean a bad film but for a first-time director it is something of a handicap and with a lesser cast Testud would have been well and truly sunk.  Fortunately, the combined efforts of Binoche and Kassovitz, two of French cinema’s most bankable stars, salvage the film, with the help of a top-notch supporting cast that includes such talented performers as Danièle Lebrun, Vernon Dobtcheff and François Berléand.   La Vie d’une autre is far from perfect, and in places it is pretty cringeworthy, but for all its failings it does have considerable charm and just about passes muster for a debut piece, although you can’t help wishing that Testud had stuck with her day job.

© James Travers 2012

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?