The lost soul is a go-to archetype to lead smaller, character-driven narratives. Feeling lost and adrift in the day-to-day, with those passing by always seeming more focused and assured of themselves than our protagonist, is a staple narrative of cinema. They come in all shapes and sizes: wandering youth, particularly the jump from high school to college; a man's midlife crisis as he quits his job and tries to find the meaning of life (with one even winning Best Picture).
There are some particularly powerful titles of this genre but many, when you boil it down, are just about bored rich people. These types of pictures can fail to resonate with audiences because, sure, wouldn’t we all love to walk away from our 9 to 5s and eat ice cream in Italy and sleep with a handsome stranger? Eat Pray Love is the Queen Mother of movies that fail to check their class privilege and resemble travel and food porn posts on social media rather than a meaningful mediation of what it means to be alive. The final movie from French filmmaker Sophie Fillières, This Life of Mine (Ma vie ma gueule in French) lies in the middle of this spectrum. It doesn’t feature Julia Roberts casually dropping an endless stash of cash on the trip of a lifetime, but it doesn’t give us reason enough to follow its protagonist as she tries to find meaning in this life of hers.
What Is 'This Life of Mine' About?
Barberie is a 50-something French woman who has had to become her own companion. Divorced with an unfulfilling job as a copywriter, she can’t even enjoy her McDonald’s lunch without accidentally sitting beside her teenage daughter Rose (Angélina Woreth) in the park and hearing a slew of insults about herself. She’s a disappointment and annoyance to her daughter, she draws the ire and pity of her adult son Junior (Édouard Sulpice), and she doesn’t feel understood by or connected to anyone in her life. After a chance meeting with a childhood sweetheart, decades since they last spent a summer together, Barberie’s existential crisis spins into a full mental breakdown, and she checks herself into a psychiatric hospital.
The first half of the movie is more concerned with reminding you repeatedly that Barberie isn’t like other people. But rather than depicting her struggling with loneliness and feeling disassociated from her job, friends, and family, the movie frames her as a kooky, quirky girl whose only character affectations are that she talks to herself and talks a lot. Barberie repeatedly questions whether she’s going mad because she has conversations with herself in the mirror. Moments like this put the commentary of the film back a couple of decades. Barberie’s conversations are depicted as if they’re the strangest things anyone has ever done, despite most people admitting to speaking out loud to themselves. She’s able to coherently reel off exactly how she’s feeling, and rather than being signs of an impending mental breakdown, it feels like an unoriginal tactic to spoonfeed the audience exactly how the character is feeling.
'This Life of Mine' Doesn't Handle Mental Health With Nuance
As mental health and topics of loneliness, depression, and anxiety become more common themes in cinema, with increasingly more accurate depictions, Fillières’ approach in This Life of Mine feels more akin to the ‘90s treatment of such topics. This is mainly due to the script’s directionless flow of stream-of-consciousness conversations, may they be between Barberie and herself or with strangers or her children. For a film that wants to talk about the most basic human emotions, it’s odd for it to give the characters dialogue that in no way feels recognizable or familiar. Instead of unpacking how mental illness pronounces itself in someone, Fillières, like many films from over 20 years ago, simply alludes to it to make Barberie seem more interesting.
The film cuts to Barberie in her room in the psychiatric ward, and it comes as a total headspin because the narrative jumps over the very dark, very stressful period that usually comes before a mentally ill person decides they need help. Up until then, Barberie is framed as a Bridget Jones-like clutz, and the film completely shifting gears to the somber setting of a mental institution results in a tonal whiplash that's difficult to recover from. It calls back to the cinema of yesteryear that exploited mental illnesses, using it to describe middle-class malaise. When the most egregious symptom of Barberie's condition is that she refuses to call her nurses by their names, it calls into question just how interested the movie is in trying to represent topics that are so much darker than being rude to staff.
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It’s reiterated throughout the movie that no one understands Barberie, but Fillières’ script doesn’t make much of an effort to allow the audience any insight into her either. We know the basics of her unfulfilling existence, but the script doesn’t build any interiority for the character or what she’s going through. Fillières doesn't try to craft a backstory for her main character that would've made the journey we watch her on more rewarding. The second half is much stronger, as we follow Barberie on a journey to the UK, trying to find a place where she belongs. Fillières' decades of experience are put on full, glorious display, and her capturing of the Scottish highlands is the visual peak of the film.
Angélina Woreth Stands Out in an Emotionally Honest Performance
This Life of Mine’s lead performer, Agnès Jaoui, may not be a household name to English-speaking audiences, but she’s a veteran of the French screen (particularly for her collaborations with her former partner Jean-Pierre Bacri). She directed and co-wrote the 2000 drama, The Taste of Others, which was nominated for the Best International Feature Oscar. Her turn as Barberie parallels the script in its tonal hopscotch, constantly flipping from comedy to heavy drama and rarely landing any of the right moves.
While Jaoui does track Barberie’s shift from disillusionment to depression to acceptance, she maintains an invisible shield that prevents the audience from forging any palpable bond with the character. And when the narrative revolves around this one character and their mental landscape, this lack of resonance is impossible to ignore. When it feels like the scattery script can’t get a grip on the more weighty topics, it just takes one cut to Angélina Woreth’s face as Rose to sober up the film. A particularly tender moment between the mother and daughter is the closest the movie gets to any emotional truth, and it feels like Woreth is doing much of the heavy lifting. She’s a much-needed sobering presence, making it a shame that this relationship wasn’t fleshed out more.
According to Variety, Fillières died shortly after filming concluded, and the post-production was overseen by her two children, with some notes that the filmmaker made in hospital. The disparity between production and post is felt, and it’s a deep shame that Fillières wasn’t able to fulfill her full vision. Her strengths as a filmmaker are much easier to glean from her last effort than in her storytelling tactics, as her shots of the great natural beauty of Scotland tell us so much more than Barberie’s ramblings. It’s an uneven swan song that feels out of place in today’s cinematic sensibilities, but surely one not too egregious to detract from the rest of Fillières’ career.
This Life of Mine screened at this year's Subtitle Film Festival.
Sophie Fillières' final film is an uneven comedy drama that uses weighty topics merely to drive forward its thin script.
- Angélina Woreth as Rose gives an emotionally honest and vulnerable performance.
- The shots of the Scottish highlands at the end are magnificent.
- The movie mishandles its discussion of weighty topics such as mental illness.
- It frames struggling with mental health as quirky and whimsical.
- We don't forge a connection with the main character, making it hard to invest in her story.
This Life of Mine explores the journey of Barbie, a once devoted mother and partner, as she confronts personal and existential challenges at age 55. The film delves into themes of identity, relationships, and societal roles, capturing her descent into darkness while navigating life's complexities.
- Release Date
- September 18, 2024
- Director
- Sophie Fillières
- Cast
- Agnès Jaoui , Philippe Katerine , Édouard Sulpice , Angelina Woreth , Valérie Donzelli , Emmanuel Salinger , Laurent Capelluto , Maxence Tual
- Runtime
- 99 minutes
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