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5 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
If you were born a woman..., 17 January 2003
Author: dbdumonteil

...you're born to be hurt.That's one of Maupassant's recurrent topic. Astruc only adapted the first half of the novel,which is probably this great writer's finest work along with his famous short stories which influenced a lot of people (Dudley Nichols found inspiration for "stagecoach" in "Boule de Suif")

There is a splendid cinematography ,where Claude Renoir's camera works wonders in a green ,too green Normandy."Une vie' tells the tale of a woman,Jeanne, (Schell) married with a man who treats her like a dog,cheating on her with every woman around.And this woman could not divorce,because it was the nineteenth century.

The second part of the novel is Jeanne's son's story and it's as tragic as the first one.But Astruc chose to end his movie before.

Alexandre Astruc ,though he came to the fore with the new wave was not part of them.His estheticism sometimes recalls the great patriarches:Jean Renoir (une partie de campagne) and Max Ophuls (le plaisir),but his style is harsher without any lyric outpouring.His style was called the camera-stylo (pen camera).

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2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
What A Life, 28 March 2007
7/10
Author: writers_reign from London, England

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Maupassant scholars and pedants will find ample grist for their respective mills in this entry given that Astruc has opted to take the source material merely as a guide and instead of starting at A and proceeding inexorably to Z he has reserved the right to take a bowl of alphabet soup, select a letter at random, explore it, exhaust it and then select another and so on. It's not unlike taking War and Peace as your starting point and ending up with The Red Badge Of Courage; they have war in common but not a great deal else.

Arguably the photography gets the lion's share of the plaudits. Muted colour and time after time a grouping that suggests Renoir or other Impressionists. Somewhat bizarrely the music at times - notably the opening which is a sort of reverse Sound Of Music with a young girl running through a meadow but AWAY from the camera rather than towards it - seems to fight the lyricism sounding almost martial rather than melodic. Maria Schell was tailor made for the role of the young, idealistic girl who believes naively that if a man says he loves her he must mean it and lives to be disabused of her belief and abused in most other ways. There's a nice twist on the cuckolded husband who traditionally takes a weapon to his wife's lover; here, disturbing a tryst in a portable bathing hut the wronged spouse simply wheels it to the cliff-top and sends it to where it will do the most good. All this is roughly half of what Maupassant wrote and Astruc has chosen to end it there and omit the story of the heroine's son. As it stands it is a fine piece of story telling.

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2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
This great movie offers a rare comfortable distance, 4 December 2001
Author: sleepsev (bearania@yahoo.com) from Bangkok, Thailand

The use of colors in this movie is quite impressive. I think the colors are truly beautiful, and I feel the use of colors here is somehow different from other movies, but I can't quite tell exactly how it is different. I'm also impressed by another hard-to-describe aspect of this movie: the comfortable distance between the audience and the characters. I find myself enjoy watching this movie many times, though I'm not really interested in the story and these kinds of characters. Why do I enjoy watching it while feeling uninvolved in it? It is because I feel very comfortable watching it. I feel as if there is an emotional space of a very appropriate size separating me from the characters. I don't feel the characters' feelings are too far away from me that I lose interest in them, and nor do I feel the movie pushes the characters' feelings so overwhelmingly close to me that I feel uncomfortable. I don't really know how the director can make me feel like this, and I wonder whether he intentionally created that pleasant distance.

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