15/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: Agnès Jaoui carries on her shoulders the last film by the late Sophie Fillières, a tragicomedy emblematic of the director's poetic singularity on a human scale

“I felt my time was running out", “how many showers before I die?”, “I want to remember everything, every moment.” When the writer-director of the film in which the protagonist utters these words dies just after filming, it's obviously impossible to completely disregard the event and just talk about the work itself. And yet Sophie Fillières' This Life of Mine, which the 77th Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight has chosen (to its credit) to open its 2024 edition, proves to be a perfectly faithful mirror of the playful, existentialist soul so often explored (from Ouch in Locarno to Nice Girl in Toronto, and Pardon my French [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and If You Don't, I Will [+see also:
trailer
film profile] at the Berlinale) by a filmmaker who was not afraid of the burlesque and the sometimes absurd emotions of life - quite the opposite, in fact, as they nourished her slightly offbeat imagination, like a poetic philosophy allowing us to look at the trials and tribulations of everyday life, our weaknesses and our doubts, with a different, tenderly ironic eye.

“I'm 55 and I still don't know what my nature is”. Barberie Bichette (the excellent Agnès Jaoui) struggles with herself in front of her silent shrink. It has to be said that the woman working in surrealistic advertising slogans is not at her best ("She's lonely as a dog. Who'd want to have sex with her?” confided her schoolgirl daughter to a friend, a conversation she happened to overhear). With her rather zany, assertive personality, she who is sometimes a little ashamed of it (especially as she often puts herself in socially embarrassing situations), the woman nicknamed Barbie wavers at the thought of time passing: her father, a former conjurer, is now bedridden, she herself is worried about becoming an old woman, she's starting to talk to herself, communicates awkwardly with her children (“Do you need money?”), etc. And a man - a memory of love that has been completely erased (or repressed?) - resurfaces from her adolescence to take care of her, and sends her into a tizzy and a clinic. From now on, like in a game of chess with herself, Barbie has to decide if and how she can regain a taste for life and face the storm. But she's never short of ideas...

Constructed in three parts (“Pif”, “Paf” and “Youkou!”), This Life of Mine is both a funny and moving portrait, an in-between of lightness and depth where simple truths emerge in small cues woven through often comical twists and turns and set against a sumptuous Scottish backdrop. It's a beautiful, noble and elegant way for Sophie Fillières to bid farewell to the world, talking about serious matters common to us all but never pretending to take herself seriously, while subtly reappropriating her own life story.

This Life of Mine was produced by Christmas in July and internationally sold by The Party Film Sales.

(Translated from French by Margaux Comte)