Unveiled in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, A Woman's Life is Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s second feature film, following Anaïs in Love, which premiered in Critics’ Week in 2021.

Cineuropa: Where did the idea for the film come from? What about the main character?
Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet: Yes, the desire to write a female character in her fifties who had chosen to build her life around something other than motherhood and family, who had found fulfilment and success in her work, in a job she is passionate about, in which she excels, but without giving up her love life or her sex life. It was very important to me to show a woman of that age in her social life, in her erotic life, because I feel that it’s quite rare, and that it opens people’s minds a little. It was almost a political statement. I wanted to create a character who couldn’t be reduced to anything. Those around her (her husband, her best friend) accuse her of being selfish, hard, uncompromising, invincible, and so on. Whereas in fact, she is someone who devotes herself to others, who has studied for 15 years and works 80 hours a week to care for patients, to save them, to rebuild them, to give them back a face, to enable them to reconnect with others. And even though she has no children, she looks after her elderly, sick mother and pays for her nephew’s education. What interested me was that she is full of contradictions.

How did you strike a balance between these various short portraits within the larger portrait, which comprises 11 chapters, 11 stages of his life?
My idea was that we are never exactly the same person depending on who we are talking to. And therefore, Gabrielle would not be the same with her partner, with her mother, with her husband or with a patient. I wanted to explore different facets of this woman. That’s one of the main reasons I structured the film in chapters. The secondary characters — the most important people in her life — appeared one after the other. I really wanted her to have a beautiful romantic relationship with her husband, based on mutual understanding and trust, something truly mature. I wanted the audience to understand, through her mother’s character, that Gabrielle comes from a modest background, that she has come a long way to become who she is. I also wanted us to see her taking on a huge amount of responsibility in her private life. Furthermore, I knew I didn’t want too much drama, not too much artificial storytelling: I wanted us to watch her live. I also wrote with a sense of contrast in terms of tone and rhythm from one chapter to the next. I wanted fairly long time blocks, separated by quite significant gaps, so that the viewer would sometimes need to catch up on information they might have missed, because three weeks or three months might haved passed between one chapter and the next.

The film opens with a close-up of the character’s skin, and we see it a lot throughout. What were your main directorial choices?
The film begins with a sort of chaotic jumble, images that are rather indecipherable. I wanted the audience not to understand exactly what they were looking at, and for them to gradually realise that these were fragments of the face and body of someone making love. Then, the film’s task would be to piece together this character’s identity and personality. I also wanted to focus, almost throughout the entire film, very closely on Léa Drucker’s face, which fascinates me; I find it truly captivating and rather enigmatic. As for the setting, I wanted to film it as little as possible, because this is a very intimate and deeply existential portrait. And then, of course, there’s the love scene between Gabrielle and Frida, which poses a real narrative challenge: to show Gabrielle — a strong, powerful woman who tackles everything head-on and has everything under control — as someone who is rather clumsy, shy and fragile.

What exactly about the character of Frida the novelist?
She acts as a sort of conduit for the viewer in the film. It is through her eyes that we discover Gabrielle, right from the very first scene, because Frida knows nothing about the hospital environment. I wanted to create a real contrast between Gabrielle’s professional world — a world of overload, overactivity, and chaos, something frenetic — and Frida, who is more on the side of observation, slowness, contemplation, and silence. For Gabrielle, meeting Frida is a real change of scenery and opens up new perspectives. The chapter set in the mountains is precisely a reversal of perspectives: it is the first time Gabrielle looks at someone and takes the time to consider another possible life.

Is this a film about love in all its forms?
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s true. It’s marital love, familial love with her mother, sister and nephew, the love of friendship with Kamyar’s character, the passionate love that emerges in the form of Frida, and the love of work, which is central to Gabrielle’s life. It’s also true because what interests me is the intensity, the depth, the human richness, the very heart of intimacy.