“Ma vie ma gueule”, the seventh and last feature film by Sophie Fillières

Following her wishes, her two children, Agathe and Adam Bonitzer, took part in the editing of the film
alongside François Quiqueré, with whom she was collaborating for the first time. With them, she was able to take a first look at her film’s rushes. Ma vie ma gueule (a fantastic title) is divided into three distinct parts: ‘Pif’, ‘Paf’ and ‘Youkou!’, three childish shouts, amusing words which were very dear to Fillières. ‘Three independent moments, separated by ellipses, of the life of a woman in her fifties, on the brink of change’, as she had described it to Pierre Eugène from the Cahiers du cinéma in February 2023.

This woman, portrayed by Agnès Jaoui whose energy is admirable, is both depressed and spirited, named Barberie Bichette and nicknamed Barbie (which she doesn’t really like), and is ‘at her wit’s end’. A poet, she also writes for an advertising agency where she sometimes bursts through the doors to write a poem on a paperboard before leaving, letting the ‘creatives’ take what they want from her poetical bouts.
Aside from her children – teenagers with which she maintains remote relationships – and from her sister
(Valérie Donzelli), a school administrator, she meets a famous artist (Philippe Katerine) whose name she
constantly mangles (playing with words is her world), and an old high school friend (Sergio Capelluto), who she cannot for the life of her remember, and who will upset her life to the point of sending her to a psych ward. There, annoyed as she is, she decides to call everyone ‘Fanfan’…

To be truthful, Ma vie ma gueule is a film that is undeniably funny, yet at the same time often tough, more so than any of Sophie Fillières’s projects. Struggling against the obstacles life throws at you, against yourself, against everyone else, is not easy, and not always fun. And if the films’s ending, filled with hope in a manner reminiscent of Rossellini, does bring Katerine back as some sort of guardian angel, it is still the sorrowful humorousness of life, and some sense of the toughness of it, that define this odd film which resembles nothing if not its director as she was in life. This movie being the opener to the Quinzaine des cinéastes is a joyful and deserved honor.

Traduction Emma Frigo