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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Seeking Mavis Beacon: the search for an elusive Black tech hero

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New documentary looks for a woman who was synonymous with typing in the 80s and 90s, with surprising results

Before bashing out emails and text messages by thumb became an accepted form of communication, typing was a fully manual skill. In the 80s, “the office” was an exclusive preserve for freaks who could type 40 words per minute at least. Those too modest or miserly to sign up for brick-and-mortar classes could pick up a software program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for $50. At my Catholic high school, the application was the typing class. The priests just switched on the computers.

Launched in late 1987, Mavis Beacon quickly assumed pride of place on home PC desks amid floppy disks for SimCity and After Dark. Among other features, Mavis gamified typing drills and tracked typing progress in explicit detail. Its defining feature was the elegant Black woman with a cream suit and slicked-back bob marching proudly off to her high-rise job on the cover of the software package. But it would take a few more decades for the bigger lesson in the pitfalls of relinquishing control over your image and likeness to corporate interests.

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