OBSERVER: This Life Of Mine
This Life of Mine, the final film from writer-director Sophie Fillières before her untimely death last year at the age of 58, tells the story of a woman in the midst of a nervous breakdown.
Barbie (Agnès Jaoui) is a divorced, 50-something French woman writing her autobiography and worrying about fonts.
“Is it sober, or is it nothing?” she muses as she types.
Choosing another font, she decides it’s anorexic and “weighs itself each morning”.
“No comment,” she says while trying another Arial Hebrew Scholar.
A friend calls, and Barbie lies, stating she is at the gym.
The lies spiral; she’s listening to a favourite tune; she must take a shower before the water is turned off for repairs.
This strange opening to the film initiates the viewer into Barbie’s slowly disintegrating world.
She works as an advertising copywriter, but instead of composing a tagline for a “cereal with a hole”, she writes a poem, “A dog day”, for her bemused colleagues.
“I still don’t know what my nature is,” she tells her poker-faced psychiatrist.
Fillières documents Barbie’s slow psychological collapse, injecting encounters with Barbie’s daughter Rose (Angelina Woreth) and son Junior (Édouard Sulpice) and offbeat meetings with strangers with equal amounts of empathy and humour.
Jaoui is perfect as Barbie, capturing the feeling of being a bystander in your own life.
Released from the hospital, Barbie takes a trip to Scotland, reconnecting with places she stayed in as a young woman and finding peace and acceptance, if not a cure for her madness.
Finished posthumously under the direction of notes she made in her final weeks in hospital, it seems Fillières is trying to tell us that the existentialists were right when they said to us that life is absurd.
Screened as part of the Alliance French Film Festival at Palace Cinemas until April 9.
Review by Kathryn Keeble