Une vie (2016)
Directed by Stéphane Brizé

Film Review

After finding acclaim with his social drama La Loi du marché (2015), French director Stéphane Brizé nimbly switches genre and takes up the challenge of adapting one of the great works of French literature, Guy de Maupassant's 1883 novel Une vie.  It is not the first novel that Brizé has adapted - he already proved himself up to the task with his engaging 2009 romance Mademoiselle Chambon - but it is his first stab at a period piece, and with a sprawling saga that spans nearly thirty years he more than has his work cut out.  Alexandre Astruc previously adapted the novel in 1958. with Maria Schell and Christian Marquand in the lead roles, with only marginal success.  Critical reaction to Brizé's film has been pretty mixed, but it pulled off a coup by winning the prestigious Prix Louis-Delluc (cinema's equivalent to the Prix Goncourt) just a few weeks after its original French release in November 2016.

The differences between Une vie and Brizé's previous film are not so immense as you might think.  Both films revolve around a single, sympathetic character who falls foul of the social conditions of his/her time and is soon caught up in a vicious downward spiral.  In La Loi du marché the unfortunate protagonist is a middle-aged man struggling to find work; in Une vie, it is a naive woman from an aristocratic family with too fanciful a notion about marriage and human nature.  Brizé's decision to present his latest film in the now rarely used 4:3 aspect ratio (i.e. the old television format) was a deliberate artistic choice, intended to help us appreciate his heroine's hopeless confinement and her inability to free herself from the life that is imposed on her by others.  This, along with some remarkably expressive photography and meticulous handheld camera work, give the film an intimacy that compels us not only to sympathise with the central character, but to genuinely feel her distress as her world closes in on her, like some evilly conceived iron maiden, crushing her romantic delusions and leaving her utterly bereft of hope.

With only two hours in which to recount the events of 27 years in Jeanne's adult life, Brizé was pretty well obliged to resort to some form of narrative shorthand.  Instead of abridging the narrative, which would have been the more conventional and safer approach, he accelerates the exposition, frequently using a succession of brief but succinct shots to represent long passages in the novel. An obvious example is Jeanne's courtship and wedding, which take up barely a few minutes of screen time but tell us all we need to know.  Although this approach weakens the film's coherence in places (it helps if you take the trouble to read the novel beforehand) it does give the film a vitality and completeness it might otherwise have lacked.  The passage of time is marked by the passing of the seasons, the moods of the year always appearing to be in sympathy with the changing mood of the heroine as life's experiences slowly wear her down.  Brizé's technique is strikingly impressionistic, capturing the essence of Jeanne's tough  existence without dwelling on specific incidents.  As a consequence, the film has a much more brutal feel than the original novel and it feels more akin to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the earlier work that provided the inspiration for Maupassant.

In her first significant screen role, Judith Chemla makes a lasting impression as the ill-fated heroine Jeanne.  Her gradual transformation, from a silly romantic to a sad wreck of a woman prematurely aged by misfortune, is heartbreaking to watch, and that she ages imperceptibly is as much a tribute to her skill as an actress as it is to the fine work of the make-up artists.  Although Chemla monopolises our attention (naturally, as Brizé makes her the focal point of the drama), the supporting performances are just as worthy of praise - Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Yolande Moreau and Swann Arlaud all service the film's subtle, understated approach admirably.  There is a distinctly Bressonian or Bergmanesque quality to Brizé's mise-en-scène - the drama is always underplayed, the emotion carefully contained, and yet the impact on the spectator is intense, sometimes viscerally  so.  Une vie is Stéphane Brizé's most remarkable film to date - a stark, savage and highly personal interpretation of an essential work of French literature.

Film Synopsis

In 1819, a young woman named Jeanne Le Perthuis des Vauds leaves the content where she has been educated since childhood and returns to live with her parents on the family estate in Normandy.  As she helps out in the garden, her head full of girlish fancies, Jeanne can hardly wait to begin her adult life in earnest.  It isn't long before her Prince Charming presents himself.  Julien de Lamare is just the man she knew she would marry - a handsome aristocrat whose seductive charms no woman can resist.  How happy she is when Julien reciprocates her love and swears he will be hers for life.  But the wedding has scarcely passed before the reality of adult life begins to hit Jeanne, dispelling her childish illusions.  Julien is not the ideal husband she has imagined him to be.  He is selfish, changeable, even cruel.  But the worst is yet to come.  Tired of his wife, Julien begins having affairs with other women, setting in motion a chain of events that will test Jeanne's capacity for endurance to the limit.  Such is life...