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Film festivals play a key role in showcasing films that have yet to be released widely, but the process can be fraught with challenges. What happens when a film faces a string of rejections from other festivals after its festival debut? In the festival ecosystem, what’s not screened can be as significant as what is. Consider, for example, the remarkable Cette Vie Mine, the final project of the late French director Sophie Filleère, who passed away in 2023 at the age of fifty-eight: It premiered at Cannes last May and was received enthusiastically in France when it opened in September. But it’s only now getting a wider distribution in the U.S., as part of the annual Film at Lincoln Center Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series. Cette Vie Mine opens the series on March 6 and screens again on March 10, presented by Filleère’s children, Agathe and Adam Bonitzer, who helped complete the film. The nearly yearlong journey from its Cannes premiere to these two screenings underscores the appalling failure of festival and arthouse programmers, whose indifference has robbed American audiences of one of the most original and profound films of recent years. Its belated showings here give the entire Rendez-Vous program (which runs through March 16) the atmosphere of the Salon des Refusés — both an important exhibition and a public shaming.
Fier had a long and distinguished career in film, culminating with The Good Girl, a 2005 comedy of awkwardness. She was seriously ill while working on This Life of Mine, and passed away before it was finished. Based on detailed notes she left behind, her children oversaw the film’s completion, along with producer Julie Salvador and editor François Quiquere. This touching and sad backstory is echoed in the film itself, which follows a woman who falls gravely ill and begins ticking off items on a somewhat disordered and impulsive bucket list: meeting an old friend, having a strange adventure in the Scottish Highlands, and so on. But the greatness of This Life of Mine (its slangy French title, Ma Vie Ma Gueule, translates as “My Life, My Face”) does not come from the pathos of its production. In this film, Fier reaches new heights of sophistication and daring, combining a restrained and bold concept of cinematic execution with a subtle script and a vision that places actors, dialogue and action with pinpoint precision.
The main character, Barbie Bichette, aka Barbie, is portrayed by veteran actress Agnès Jaoui. Before anything is revealed about her, she is shown at her computer, starting a document titled “Ma vie” (My Life) and worrying loudly about which font would be best. “It’s sober or nothing,” she says, experimenting with a thin font she calls “anorexic” (she “weighs herself every morning”) and another called Arial Hebrew Scholar (“No comment”). Then a nosy friend calls her and lies about being at the gym. The lie quickly gets out of hand when she lies about what song she’s listening to while she works out, then tells a story about needing to leave the gym quickly to get home and take a shower before the water is turned off for repairs. She ends up actually going to the gym, and is then forced to lie to her friend again.
In short, Barbie is a complex character. She makes up stories for herself and others to live by. She tells jokes that others don’t understand, and then gets bogged down in explaining them. When she hears her teenage daughter Rose (Angelina Worth) and her friend make fun of her indifference to sex, she pretends not to hear, instead confusing them with a bizarre story about not being separated from Rose’s father (from whom she is very much separated).
Barbie is a poet (a published poet, she emphasizes) who also works in the creative department of an advertising agency. Late for a meeting where colleagues are trying to come up with a slogan for a breakfast cereal, she dashes to the flip chart at the front of the room, writes a poem on it, tears off a page, folds it, runs out, and loses it on the subway. Soon after, while shopping for jewelry—as she does before every major life event—she confesses to the jeweler that she has, in fact, quit her job. Barbie is a poet not only on paper but also in conversation, telling the jeweler, “I remember everything, every moment.” She is also a poet in her grand and arresting gestures, in her constant sense of duty and embarrassment, in her voluntary and involuntary generosity, in her private monologues in the bathroom, and even in her apologies to her son, Junior (Édouard Sulpice), for talking to herself in the bathroom. Her interactions with her psychoanalyst, a middle-aged man (played by Mark Strauss, a real-life psychiatrist), range from misunderstanding to
Sourse: newyorker.com
