“This Life of Mine”: A Terminal Masterwork

Film festivals are important showcases for films that don’t yet have distribution, but there’s a hitch in the process. What happens when a movie, after a première at a festival, hits a bottleneck of rejections at other festivals? In the festival circuit, what isn’t showing may be as significant as what is. Take the extraordinary movie “This Life of Mine,” the final work by the late French director Sophie Fillières, who died in 2023, at the age of fifty-eight: it premièred at the Cannes Film Festival last May, and was acclaimed in France when it was released there, in September. But only now does it get a major showcase in the U.S., in Film at Lincoln Center’s annual series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. “This Life of Mine” opens the series on March 6th, and screens there again on March 10th, introduced by Fillières’s children, Agathe and Adam Bonitzer, who helped complete the film. The nearly yearlong path from the Cannes première to these two screenings marks an appalling oversight by programmers at festivals and art-house theatres, whose indifference has cost U.S. audiences the chance to see one of the most imaginative and poignant movies of recent years. Its belated screenings here give the whole Rendez-Vous series (which runs until March 16th) the feeling of a Salon des Refusés—both a vital display and a public reproach.

Fillières had a long and noteworthy directing career; a high point is “Good Girl,” a comedy of embarrassment from 2005. She was seriously ill when she shot “This Life of Mine,” and died before the editing was done. On the basis of detailed notes she left behind, her children oversaw the film’s completion, together with its producer, Julie Salvador, and the editor, François Quiqueré. This painful, moving backstory is echoed in the movie itself, which tells the story of a woman who falls gravely ill and starts checking off items on a slightly haphazard and impulsive bucket list: a trip to see an old friend, an odd quest in the Scottish Highlands, and so on. But the greatness of “This Life of Mine” (its slangy French title, “Ma Vie Ma Gueule,” means “My Life My Face”) has nothing to do with the pathos of its production. With this film, Fillières reaches new heights of refinement and audacity, uniting a quietly bold concept of cinematic performance with a needle-fine script and a vision that sets actors, dialogue, and action as if with a jeweller’s eye.

The protagonist, Barberie Bichette—nicknamed, of course, Barbie—is played by the veteran actress Agnès Jaoui. Before anything is known about her, she’s seen at her computer, starting a document with the heading “Ma vie” (My life) and fretting out loud about what the right font might be. “Is it sober or is it nothing,” she declares, experimenting with a thin one that she calls “anorexic” (it “weighs itself each morning”) and another called Arial Hebrew Scholar (“No comment”). Then she gets a phone call from an inquisitive friend and lies that she’s at the gym. The deception quickly spirals out of control with a fib about what song she’s listening to while exercising, and then a story about needing to leave the gym quickly in order to get home and shower before the water is shut off for repairs. After all this, she actually goes to the gym and then has to lie to her friend all over again.

Barbie, in short, is complicated. She tells herself and other people stories in order to live. She makes jokes that people don’t get, and then bungles the explanations. Overhearing her teen-age daughter, Rose (Angelina Woreth), and a friend make fun of her no-sex life, she pretends not to have heard, instead bewildering them with a strange story about not being separated from Rose’s dad (from whom she is very much separated).

Barbie is a poet—a published poet, she emphasizes—who also works on the creative side at an ad agency. Showing up late for a meeting where colleagues are trying to come up with a breakfast-cereal slogan, she dashes to a flip chart at the front of the room, writes a poem on it, tears off the page, folds it up, storms out, and loses it on the Métro. Soon after, while buying a piece of jewelry—as she does for every major life event—she reveals to the jeweller that she has actually quit her job. Barbie is a poet on paper and also in chitchat, advising the jeweller, “I remember everything at every instant.” She’s also a poet in her grand and breathless gestures, in her perpetual sense of obligation and embarrassment, in her willing and unwilling 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 shrink, a middle-aged man (played by Marc Strauss, a real-life psychiatrist), veer from incomprehension to conflict, from self-revelation to humiliation. Then Barbie collapses and is next seen in a hospital bed, impatiently awaiting a visit from her children and flummoxing her doctors and nurses with her idiosyncrasies.

One needn’t know that Fillières was herself contending with a long illness, or that Jaoui plays the role of Barbie in clothing and jewelry from Fillières’s own wardrobe, to know that the filmmaker put a lot of herself into the role. (She never lets on what Barbie’s illness is or what treatment she’s getting.) Barbie is one of the great characters in recent cinema, less a self-revelation than a self-extrapolation, an exaggeration and an amplification that exalts the ordinary into myth. Barbie, though slight of physique and skittish of manner, is a colossal figure, a living legend, who combines an intense vulnerability with a sort of higher invulnerability. She surpasses the plasticized perfection of her namesake with the furious creativity of her eccentric imperfections. Barbie daily bears an ever-new round of emotional wounds, which seem to pierce her to the core of her being until—as if endowed with psychological superpowers—she closes them up, keeping the memories as material for poetry and fuel for life force.

Fillières’s writing of Barbie is torrential and angular, sending talk and gestures whizzing through peculiar situations like pinballs pinging with antic light. The movie’s dialogue could be published to be savored at leisure, but its brilliant pace and tone owe a huge amount to Jaoui, whose Barbie is one of the greatest, most inspired and imaginative performances I’ve seen onscreen in a while. Jaoui is a director and a writer as well as an actress, and she invests the role with a creative spontaneity that’s nonetheless thrillingly precise; she seems to play the part from within, purging its theatricality of artifice by way of total identification and authentic emotion. The movie’s gyroscopic energy, setting Barbie into destabilizing peril and watching her stay upright and scoot ahead, is as much a matter of the high-speed whirl of Fillières’s direction as of Jaoui’s forthright yet delicate calibration. Even if “This Life of Mine” weren’t being rescued from beyond the grave, it would be a cinematic miracle. ♦