”Another woman's life”: he, she and another. Review
Good mass cinema differs from consumer goods in one, but very fundamental property - the director's ability to work with several layers of meanings simultaneously. So that the tape seemed "their own" to a variety of people: from high-browed intellectuals to spectators who did not even hold books in their hands. Moreover, the first and the second can operate each with its own content, without entering into irreconcilable conflicts with each other.Let no one, as it was said in one old book, leave offended. And A Woman's Another Life , Sylvie Testu's directorial debut, is valuable precisely because there is a very non-trivial philosophical content behind a simple everyday story. However, the first layer of meaning, understandable to everyone in general, is very good. The film is about the young lady Marie (the brilliant Juliette Binoche), who, after the first night of love with the man of her dreams (Mathieu Kassowitz), loses 15 years and wakes up to a forty-year-old business woman with her schoolboy son and a new car. Actually, already behind the collision of the happy return of the former love (and Paul and Marie are on the verge of divorce) there are several very interesting and perfectly explained conflicts.  There is also the eternal theme of fathers and children: Marie is suing her mother after her father's death. There is also a social theme: once a poor young lady does not really understand what to do with her unexpected wealth, which, however, is not a panacea for the hell that the heroine of “Another woman’s life” falls into. There is also a separate conflict between spouses, who, as it turns out, no longer love each other, and you need to go back 15 years to understand why this neighbor is so dear to you and how to love him. But the main meaning of the picture is completely different. Modern Western philosophy (and French - most of all) in its existential content is based on the postulate of Jean-Paul Sartre“Hell is the others”(artistically embodied in the novel Albert Camus “The Stranger” ). First, we are talking about the fact that each person is a kind of self-sufficient world, and social ties are only a necessary measure of lies. Secondly, the theme of hell is embodied in the fundamental impossibility of truly understanding the other (from here, by the way, the theme of the fake of friendship and love, which is painful for all Western culture, arises). And, finally, thirdly, it turns out that others are not some African-Americans, Algerians or Persians in turbans, but ours, relatives, cultured people: a shared past and identity mean absolutely nothing.  It is worth noting that the original title of the film is" La vie d'un autre "( Another woman's life or simply Another's life ), that is, not another life, but a woman. And quite unexpected conclusions follow from this. Who isdifferentfor Marie? She herself. A young lady with a book on the beach and a business woman - is this one person? Can the first Marie understand the second? And vice versa? It's not bad when the transformation of a person into another takes place for a long time, but if one day you wake up in someone else's bed and in someone else's body - what then? Sylvie Testu has only one answer to all these questions. The answer is simple and truly French - love. Feeling for theother, makingthe otheryours allows you to defeat theotherin yourself. This is actually a very naive conclusion, which does not mean that it is wrong. Everyone can judge for himself about correctness. By oneself. Try it.  As the remarkable poet Nikolay Zvyagintsev wrote: If they have a boring garden, This matted hair, What a runway Your stripe is in the palm of your hand. All your vertical money, All the waiting eyes, As if there is a flight and a fall, Everything else is optional. The Topic of Article: ”Another woman's life”: he, she and another. Review. |
