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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Gena Rowlands: the fiercest, most incandescent star of US indie cinema

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Subtle yet tough and fearless, the actor blazed a trail through American movies in the 70s – in particular in close collaboration with her husband John Cassavetes

• Gena Rowlands, star of A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria, dies at 94

‘I was always a BROAD! I can’t stand the sight of MILK!” This is Gena Rowlands at her awe-inspiring toughest in John Cassavetes’ extraordinary drama-thriller Gloria from 1980. She is sexy, smart, a match for any man. Rowlands was a strong, passionate heroine in the tradition of Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis and Lauren Bacall. In fact, her director-husband John Cassavetes was in some ways Bogart to her Bacall. Rowlands staked a claim to the male prerogative of being sensual, dangerous and damaged; a natural survivor. In Gloria, and also in Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988), in which she plays a severe philosophy professor, Rowlands wears a belted trenchcoat, the kind that Bogart would wear.

In recent years, Rowlands was known most widely as the sweet old lady in the tearjerking drama The Notebook (2004), being read to in a retirement home by the ageing and gallant James Garner. She was tenderly directed in this film by her son, Nick Cassavetes. For all its mawkishness, the film acquired a real fanbase, but it gives only the most oblique indication of what Rowlands was like in her magnificent, leonine prime.

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