A Woman’s Life: A Great Actress Actress (review)

The director of Les Amours d’Anaïs successfully combines her taste for marivaudage with social concerns around a failing French hospital system. Léa Drucker is dazzling there.

We discovered Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet with The Loves of Anaïsportrait of a thirty-year-old who enjoyed life to the fullest according to the racing of her heart who had no desire to choose between a girl and a boy. Five years later, we find her faithful to this art of marivaudage which this time she mixes with more societal considerations by embracing the deleterious state of the French hospital system.

A mixture of genres united in one and the same character. Gabrielle, a maxillofacial surgeon and head of department, nicknamed Robocop – because she holds almost everything on her shoulders (her relationship, her mother, her sister, her team and this hospital under construction where everything seems on the verge of collapse) without ever showing a sign of weakness. A working girl suddenly struck by the unexpected, a love story with a writer (Mélanie Thierry, as always imperial) who came to her department in search of inspiration for her next novel.

A Woman’s Life embraces his hectic pace which only slows down in these moments of intimacy, where desire and voluptuousness suddenly invade his life and therefore the screen. The success of the gesture is based on a straight line writing – symbolized by a very fine management of the ellipses and the refusal of any sentimentalism – but also on the one who embodies Gabrielle. Léa Drucker fascinates with her way of taking charge of the tone of the story while gradually revealing the flaws that inhabit Gabrielle and her cracking armor.

Through her character, Charline Bourgeois-Taquet takes on this mental burden that the majority of women carry from an original point of view. By showing how Gabrielle, anything but a victim, feeds on it to be one step ahead of everyone else and makes a strength out of this succession of burdens that are quick to weaken. Woman power!

By Charline Bourgeois-Taquet. With Léa Drucker, Mélanie Thierry, Charles Berling… Duration: 1h38. Released September 9, 2026