Cannes film festival: Léa Drucker gives a bravura performance as a brilliant surgeon whose already chaotic life is further complicated by a same-sex affair with a journalist
Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a hectic, garrulous, breezily agreeable comedy of midlife emotional upheaval, unencumbered by any serious or permanent concern about any of the passion and heartache that it briefly encounters. It’s also a movie that declines to allow its characters to be changed in any way by the excitements and disappointments that life has to throw at them. Léa Drucker carries off the lead with terrifically competent elan; there’s hardly a scene in which she is not interrupted by a call on her mobile, going into bravura walk-and-talk acting on the phone while on the street, arriving at the office or getting into or out of her car.
She plays Gabrielle, a brilliant surgeon – what other sort is there in the movies? – who specialises in maxillofacial reconstruction. Gabrielle is battling budget cuts, scolding her idle interns, doing outstanding work and is heavily reliant on her assistant Kamyar (Laurent Capelluto). At home, she has a tricky relationship with her partner Henri (Charles Berling), whose teen children from his previous marriage she has raised while resenting his ingratitude for this, as well as for his somewhat semi-detached attitude to their relationship. She is also deeply concerned by her elderly mother Arlette (tenderly played by Marie-Christine Barrault) who is entering the twilight of dementia.
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Cannes film festival: Léa Drucker gives a bravura performance as a brilliant surgeon whose already chaotic life is further complicated by a same-sex affair with a journalistCharline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a h...
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