A Woman’s Life review – a breezy comedy of midlife crisis and same-sex affair

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Cannes film festival: Léa Drucker gives a bravura performance as a brilliant surgeon whose already chaotic life is further complicated by a same-sex affair with a journalist Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a hectic, garrulous, breezily agreeable comedy of midlife emotional upheaval, unencumbered by any serious or permanent concern about any of the passion and heartache that it briefly encounters. It’s also a movie that declines to allow its characters to be changed in any way by the excitements and disappointments that life has to throw at them. Léa Drucker carries off the lead with terrifically competent elan; there’s hardly a scene in which she is not interrupted by a call on her mobile, going into bravura walk-and-talk acting on the phone while on the street, arriving at the office or getting into or out of her car. She plays Gabrielle, a brilliant surgeon – what other sort is there in the movies? – who specialises in maxillofacial reconstruction. Gabrielle is battling budg...
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And Their Children After Them review – racism and revenge festers in smalltown France

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Venice film festival
Nineties-set drama adapted from the bestselling novel zeroes in on tensions in a post-industrial community, sparked by a feud over a motorbike

Class and racial tensions come to the boil in this potent tale of disaffected youth in smalltown France. Co-directed by Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma from Nicolas Mathieu’s bestselling novel, this is a state-of-the-nation drama dressed up as a coming-of-age tale (or possibly vice-versa); it is at once intimate and expansive in the way in which it connects the low-rise estates to the posh homes on the hill. It also brings a dose of dirty social-realism to this year’s Venice film festival.

The time-frame is the 90s, although its socio-economic tensions still apply, just as the (fictional) burg of Heillange is broadly representative of a thousand other towns in France and elsewhere; living in the shadow of its shuttered steelworks and inhabited by too many people with too little to do. Heillange, we are told, is “a town of hard times”, where the big local news is the opening of an indoor ski slope. The white ex-steelworkers live in humdrum terraced houses and the immigrant ex-steelworkers live in the humdrum block of flats down the road. Neither camp evidently has much to do with the other until a minor crisis triggers a chain reaction.

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