A Woman's Life

The director’s key narrative strategy is ellipses. We don’t see the key events: Jeanne’s acceptance of Julien’s proposal, their wedding, his betrayal, her bedroom discovery, her forgiveness, Julien’s second betrayal with Jeanne’s second close friend, the husband’s retribution. Jeanne’s responses to her grown son Paul’s pleas, etc etc. We see the events leading up to them and their consequences but not those key moments. 

That’s because the events don’t matter. What matters is the system in which the woman is trapped. The 19th Century French lady is a helpless cog in her rural aristocracy, with the illusion of making a decision but always remaining the instrument and victim of the male-cantered system. 

Of course a historical film is always a reflection of our present as well as in the imaged past. If we were entirely free from this condition, why make a movie about its earlier occurrence?

The two priests confirm this inherent abuse. The old priest coaxes Jeanne into forgiving Julien’s first affair because he wants to retire with this affirmation of forgiveness. She must serve the priest’s interest. Her mother supports his coercion and her father fails to defend his daughter’s interest. 

The young priest instructs her to an activism she knows will be disastrous — and proves her right when he intervenes himself. Again the priest places his own moral impulse, the church’s stern dictate, ahead of Jeanne’s needs. The woman’s instincts were wiser than the two priests’ commands, which in opposite ways ruin her. 

But that’s the woman’s role here — to cultivate her emotions and sentiments but not to wield any agency even over her own life. Jeanne can’t raise her son how she wants to, which may — or may not — be a factor in Paul’s adult failures. Assigning woman feelings but no power explains the film’s other structural use of time — the constant use of flashbacks. 

The film intercuts the heroine’s bleak last years with the intermingling of her early and her later years. The implication is that however harsh her misfortune and fate she continually seeks solace in memories of her brighter past. This nostalgia is less reassuring than debilitating. Remembering her happy days with her maid, Julien’s rosy courtship, her cute young son’s promise and devotion, prevents her from asserting her will against their manipulation and betrayal later. Not for Jeanne the joyful memories her mother carries from the passionate affair Jeanne discovers in her letters. Jeanne’s happy memories bring her no comfort.

In the opening scene Jeanne’s father teaches her to plant and tend her seedlings. That’s the only useful thing the sheltered -- and thus doomed — woman is taught. The film returns again and again to this gardening. The atmosphere darkens from the first sunny planting in the mud to the final pitch-dark harvest, the spirited Jeanne hardens and darkens.  

The seeds provide the same fruit in the human cycle. Son Paul proves a third-generation wastrel. Jeanne bankrupts herself paying off his debts as Julien did paying off his own father’s. Jeanne’s gift of a little steam whistle blossoms into Paul’s disastrous investment in a steamship company, one of his many doomed adventures.

The film’s thesis is clear: the men make the decisions and screw up. The woman pays the price. That is a woman’s life. The English title, by the way, is more pointed than the original: Une vie.

Her one defence is sisterhood. Maid Rosalie is her girlhood chum, whom Julien coerces into an affair. Against his demands, Jeanne insists on keeping her on when she’s pregnant, until she finds her in Julien’s bed again. Even knowing Rosalie is carrying Julien’s child, Jeanne insists on keeping her on. When Jeanne agrees to forgive him, her father gives Rosalie a farm in which she weds, raises her son, and prospers.  When Jeanne is bankrupt and desolate Rosalie asks to return to serve her, unpaid, as return for the grace she was given. When Jeanne irrationally clings to her faith in her absent and exploiting son, Rosalie suffers Jeanne’s abuse and suspicion — because she knows that is her role, not just as maid and friend but as woman.  
     The women’s relationship ends the film on a possibly optimistic note. Rosalie brings back from Paris an infant girl — supposedly Paul’s, but perhaps just another infant in need of a home — and his promise to return to Jeanne himself, after he clears up some business in Paris (a familiar story). Whether Paul returns is both doubtful and irrelevant. The film closes on the three females, the two lifelong friends and the infant. They personify the film’s positive values and generous spirit in the face of the men’s failure and abusive authority. As Rosalie assures us, “The world isn’t as bad or as good as we think.” Any hope for the future lies in the women.