THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
There are films like this which are not afraid of being ridiculous – that very French fear at the root of an overly restrictive Cartesian conception of cinema – and which risk everything, even putting themselves in serious danger. In the work of Jean-Paul Civeyrac, intimate and evanescent since Neither Eve nor Adam (1997), A woman of our time marks a change of gear, an attempt to extend its fictional scope to territories likely to reach a wide audience. It is indeed the first time that he calls upon a popular star – Sophie Marceau –, and that he ventures on the highways of a genre as marked as the hexagonal thriller, and therefore of an imaginary of loan.
To this is added another ambition, which the title literally exposes: to sculpt a female figure at the center of contemporary issues which concern the renegotiation of relations between the sexes. Juliane (Sophie Marceau), police commissioner, has undertaken to write a book about her sister Lydia, who died five years earlier. But while she is investigating the death of a corrupt agent, suspicions come to her about the repeated absences of her husband Hugo (Johan Heldenbergh), a real estate agent, caught in the company of a mistress.
A fiction that takes off little
roughly from the first degree to
quite extravagant symbolism
The pain is all the more acute as the man remains attentive, irreproachable (except perhaps with regard to the death of Lydia). One evening, knowing he was in good company in a Norman villa, Juliane takes the wheel to settle his account. But on the road, she comes across a mother and her daughter being chased by an abusive father. Juliane then decides to free herself from the procedures to bring them direct assistance – a misconduct that will turn dangerously.
A woman of our time is the story of this departure from the track, a deviation that involves a double metamorphosis: that of a fiction gradually taking off from the first degree towards a symbolism (quite extravagant), at the same time as its heroine reaches the mythological stage. The film does indeed begin in the well-known regions of the criminal narrative, with its character as an honest female cop as an exit from a TV series. The logic of the investigation and the reasons for anxiety attached to gender nevertheless move into the sphere of the couple, a couple clashing over their maturity (and their bourgeois comfort: a large property in the suburbs) to find there the first germ of disintegration.
You have 46.74% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.