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A Woman's Life(Une vie)

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France, Belgium · 2016
1h 59m
Director Stéphane Brizé
Starring Judith Chemla, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Swann Arlaud, Yolande Moreau
Genre Drama

Normandy, 1819. Jeanne is a young woman full of childish dreams and innocence when she returns home after finishing her schooling in a convent. She marries a local Viscount, Julien de Lamare, who soon reveals himself to be a miserly and unfaithful man. Little by little Jeanne’s illusions are stripped away.

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90

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

Its images and scenes are suffused by an intensity that seems almost to be a quality of the light and air as they play across Ms. Chemla’s watchful, sometimes inscrutable features.

90

Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl

The ending is a joy and a heartbreaker, but what lingers from this revelatory life is that compact world Jeanne inhabits, and how each tragedy, each happiness, and each everyday gesture together accrete into the woman we discover again and again.

90

Variety by Jay Weissberg

A Woman’s Life has the kind of majesty found not in the grand gesture but the modest detail, the kind that accumulates resonance with each seemingly minor event until the picture of a character becomes as complete as a painting by Ingres. Or a story by Maupassant.

60

CineVue by John Bleasdale

A Woman's Life is a modest chamber piece, a series of sketches revealing a life of quiet desperation, which eschews melodrama and, for the most part, platitudes but exhibits great tenderness and sensitivity.

50

The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo

Mostly, though, A Woman’s Life frustrates because it’s neither entertaining nor illuminating to watch a character passively absorb constant misery.

67

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

Chemla has an expressive face and she’s photographed lovingly, in a way that would probably have caught the attentions of the great French Impressionists, but ultimately she is more of a sculptural presence than a fully fleshed-out protagonist.

58

The Film Stage by Rory O'Connor

While the viewer might appreciate Brizé’s lack of compromise, for such a stoic and rather long period piece, A Woman’s Life offers little else for the audience to cling on to.

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