A Woman's Life

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet announced herself with Anaïs in Love (2021), a buoyant romantic comedy that opened Critics' Week at Cannes. La vie d'une femme is her second feature, and a marked step up in scale and ambition: a French–Belgian production written with Fanny Burdino and produced by Les Films Pelléas, it premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in 2026, competing for the Palme d'Or.

At its centre is Gabrielle, a middle-aged, childless surgeon whose existence has been almost entirely given over to her work. When a writer begins shadowing her in order to base a novel on her, the attention slowly destabilises the careful order she has built. Léa Drucker — in the midst of one of the strongest runs of her career, after Last Summer — gives the role a watchful, contained intensity, supported by Mélanie Thierry and Charles Berling.

Reviewed strongly at Cannes, where it holds an 89% score on Rotten Tomatoes, the film confirms Bourgeois-Tacquet's move from the effervescence of her debut towards something more searching and adult. It joins a rich seam of recent French cinema built around complex women in middle life, and gives Drucker another part worthy of her gifts.