La Vie continue (1981)
Directed by Moshé Mizrahi

Film Review

At the height of her popularity in the early 1980s, Annie Girardot turned in one of her most authentic performances in this understated but highly involving romantic drama, scripted and directed with genuine human feeling by Moshé Mizrahi.  La Vie continue appears modest, even banal, compared with Mizrahi's earlier racially themed drama La Vie devant soi (1977), which won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film in 1978, but its low-key account of an ordinary woman rebuilding her life in the wake of a terrible personal calamity is true to life and subtly poignant.  There's not a hint of forced sentimentality here, no blatant heart-string tugging and certainly no contrived happy ending.  It's just an honest, no frills depiction of someone learning to appreciate life again after the death of her life partner.  Quietly evoking the recessionary gloom of France in the early 80s, Yves Lafaye's muted photography lends the film a pleasant melancholic feel which is effectively complemented by a beautifully wistful score from Georges Delerue.

Annie Girardot is famous for playing feisty, independently minded modern women in a diverse range of dramas, comedies and thrillers across four decades.  As the lead character in La Vie continue, she inhabits a far more down-to-Earth persona, the kind of modest, unassuming middle-aged woman you could walk past in the street without noticing.  It's a subtly written role which only an actress of Girardot's talent could convincingly pull off, and far from being a dull character part the actress makes it one of her more interesting screen portrayals, one that offers some fascinating insights into the female psyche.  It would be a sin to overlook the strong contributions from the top notch supporting cast - Jean-Pierre Cassel and a yoghurt-obsessed Pierre Dux are both excellent - but this is unmistakably Girardot's film.  Despite its bleak observations on the transience and fragility of human relationships, La Vie continue is a compassionately drawn piece that is surprisingly uplifting.

Film Synopsis

Jeanne Lemaire leads a simple but contented life with her husband Gérard and their three children.  Her cosy routine is thrown into a turmoil one Sunday morning when her husband suffers a fatal heart attack.  Suddenly she finds she hasn't enough money to support herself and her children, and so she ends up having to go out to work.  A friendly Jewish couturier provides Jeanne with both sympathy and a fulfilling job, and in the meantime she embarks on a new romantic adventure with a man of her own age, Pierre Marchand.  But just as Jeanne appears to have begun to rebuild her life her fragile happiness is once again threatened...