Poetic French tale ‘A Woman’s Life’ captivates Venice

VENICE (AFP) - The beautifully crafted “A Woman’s Life” by French director Stephane Brize about the tormented life of a baroness seduced the Venice film festival Tuesday, as it entered the race for the coveted Golden Lion.

Brize, whose last film “The Measure of a Man” (2015) competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, winning best actor, here adapts the first novel written by 19th century author Guy de Maupassant into a rich period drama.

Dark-haired Jeanne (played by Judith Chemla) is still brimming with a quiet, childish innocence when she returns to the family chateau in Normandy in 1819 after finishing her schooling in a convent.

She spends her days pottering about in the garden with her parents, the baron (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and baroness (Yolande Moreau), who are open-minded and doting, but do little to prepare her for adulthood.

Jeanne falls for and marries a handsome local viscount, Julien (Swann Arlaud), but the claustrophobic scene of their first night in bed together hints at the darkness of betrayal and heartbreak to come.

The film, shot in a square rather than the standard rectangle ratio, pulls together the key moments from the novel in a quick-moving series, taking the viewer from Jeanne’s first sight of Julien to their courtship and marriage bed in just four shots.

‘A disturbing intensity’

The camera lingers on the protagonist as she digs the earth in the sunshine or is pummeled by wind and rain, with both the elements and the director’s framing choice echoing her state of mind.

Brize told journalists he had been attracted to Jeanne’s story because “there is something disturbing about her intensity, her immense trust in man, the special relationship she has with the world.”

“When I took my own first steps into the adult world I had the same feelings as Jeanne, I found it difficult to abandon my childhood,” he said, describing it as “a painful experience.”

“Jeanne does not want to or cannot follow this path, and remains attached to her childhood, which is a beautiful but tragic thing at the same time,” he said.

The decision to go with a restricted framing was “an instinctive, an emotional choice.”

“I explored the option of Cinemascope (used for filming widescreen), but it gave the impression everything was dusty, too classical. The closer format confines Jeanne; like a box, it is difficult to escape,” Brize said.

‘I let myself go’

Florence Vignon, who co-wrote the screenplay with Brize, said they had created flashbacks, which are absent in the novel, “to convey how she mixes the present and past, her desires and hopes, and cannot let go.”

There are long shots where an increasingly aged Jeanne -- who has a grown son by the film’s end -- stands motionless in fields or lanes, the only sound a fierce wind or torrential downpour.

“Stephane (Brize) gave me an infinite space in which to find my character, I let myself go,” Chemla said of playing Jeanne.

“I had so much time and space for the scenes that I forgot myself. Even the atmosphere, the air changed.”

And Brize said creative flexibility was at the heart of his filmmaking process, “I don’t arrive with a piece of paper where I’ve written down what I want, I begin by sniffing the environment, like a dog picking up a scent.”