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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Last Things review – stones yield up their memories in poetic vision of life on Earth

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Deborah Stratman’s film looks far beyond humanity for answers to the big questions of survival, gathering the words of scientists and imaginative writers

Moving from the microscopic to the intergalactic, artist and film-maker Deborah Stratman offers a strikingly expansive vision of life on Earth, one that deliberately decentres human existence. With its collagist approach, this medium-length work turns to rocks for answers to the big question of survival and extinction. Having been around, in some cases, for billions of years, what do these mineral formations remember?

As explained by geologist Marcia Bjornerud, whose interviews and lectures form part of the voiceover, rocks do indeed hold memories. A bedrock, for instance, can carry traces of glaciers that no longer exist. These physical manifestations of past and present timelines encourage a different, non-linear way of looking at time and the world at large. This synergistic perspective is also reflected in Stratman’s dynamic, associative editing. Bjornerud’s empirical observations are punctuated by the enigmatic voice of film-maker Valérie Massadian, who reads out poetic passages from works by Clarice Lispector, J-H Rosny and others.

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