Cracking Up

On Ma vie ma gueule, and other crazy comedies by Sophie Fillières.

This article contains spoilers for Ma vie ma gueule.

You do (you don't) wanna be crazy
And you don't (you do) wanna be crazy
To clarify: yes/no on the crazy
We hope this helps!

—theme tune, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend season three

Truthfully, I’ve never quite understood the idea of “identifying” with a movie character. Empathising, sure—but it’s rare that anyone in a movie reminds me of myself in any direct, literal way. Nor do I have any special desire for this to occur. Still, I’ll admit to occasional twinges of recognition during Sophie Fillières’ Ma vie ma gueule, an untranslatable French title I’m using in preference to the feeble English alternative This Life Of Mine (though not a literal rendering, My Life My Ass might be closer to the spiky spirit of this and other comedies by Fillières, who died at 58 from a longterm illness soon after the shoot wrapped in 2023).

Perhaps my reaction to this particular film isn’t hugely surprising, considering it’s about a middle-aged writer—like me, like Fillières, and for that matter like Agnès Jaoui, who stars as Barbie Bichette, a sometime poet with a day job composing ad slogans, two more or less grown children (Angelina Woreth and Edouard Sulpice), and an estranged husband offscreen. Whether she has anything like an ongoing literary career is uncertain, but the ambition remains: we first see her hunched over her computer in her Paris apartment, working on what might be a memoir or a novel.

She’s blocked, of course; writers in movies always are. But it’s the details that count, like the tortoiseshell glasses she’s wearing with the right arm missing (I used to own a similar pair of glasses I wore around the house, the arm still intact but so bent out of shape I couldn’t get it round my ear). Peering over her shoulder, we see that all she’s actually written is the title—which she proceeds to try out in every possible font, till a phone call grants her permission to set aside the whole enterprise for the time being. Soon after she’s headed out the door, using a headset to continue her phone conversation with her unseen friend, who for some opaque reason she feels compelled to lie to, claiming to be arriving home from the gym, whereas in fact she’s on her way to the gym, justifying her otherwise incongruous pink sneakers, although halfway down the stairs she heads back up to the apartment to check she hasn’t left the oven on, or something like that. C’est moi.

If Barbie sounds like your sort of person as well, be warned she’s not your average quirkily relatable neurotic, any more than the film is the cosy dramedy promised in the ads (in Australia at least). While we start by following her everyday ups and downs, the downs soon dominate, a trajectory culminating in what appears to be a total breakdown, both mental and physical. For much of the second half she’s confined to some kind of clinic—and even when she emerges, you could hardly say she’s cured in any conventional sense.

Thankfully, I’ve never experienced anything like this myself. Nor have I any reason to think Fillières did either; in the film’s production notes, she explicitly warns against assuming the film is directly autobiographical. Still, I have no doubt that as Barbie’s creator she felt at least as closely connected to the character as I did as a viewer; in light of the rest of her body of work, this would be a fair bet even without the specific knowledge that she filmed scenes in her own apartment, lent Jaoui her jewellery to wear on camera, and arranged a cameo from her actual shrink.

All of Fillières’ films are comedies, but all of them have the same fraught quality, even if Ma vie ma gueule pushes this further than any of its predecessors. Putting it bluntly, her women are always at least a little crazy (perhaps her men are too, but with one or two exceptions they’re less intimately observed). Crazy here really does mean crazy, not just kooky or off-the-wall—which doesn’t make the films anything like realistic studies of mental illness, but does ensure that whimsy and anguish are two sides of the same coin.

Yet this craziness isn’t solely a negative thing, or not always. Sometimes it resembles the mania that often powers rom-coms, as with the title character played by the director’s sister Hélène Fillières in the 2000 Aïe, who claims to be an alien from another dimension (though she also claims to be bulimic, warning her suitors about her stinking breath). At the depressive end of the spectrum is Nathalie (Chiara Mastroianni), the heroine of the 2009 Un chat un chat, perhaps Fillières’ funniest film: another blocked writer, so at a loss for inspiration she briefly stops speaking altogether, she also bakes disgusting cakes in her sleep, throwing the eggs into the bowl shells and all. As for Barbie, some of her behaviour later in the film suggests schizophrenia, including addressing her nurses interchangeably as “Fanfan” and dismantling a wall light to check if it contains a camera—yet we can see that all of this has its own logic, and that she’s just as perplexed by the actions of others as they are by hers.

While the characters listed above don’t all look or act alike, there’s a family resemblance between them—especially their large, dark eyes, staring out in bewilderment at the world’s refusal to make sense. Emmanuelle Devos, who made three films with Fillières, is a different physical type, with lighter grey-blue eyes and more of a glossy, indolent quality. But she shares the jerky, fidgety body language of all Fillières’ heroines: her character Pomme in the 2014 If You Don’t I Will is the clumsiest of the lot, injuring her hand juicing oranges and later cutting a finger zipping up a jacket, mishaps that could have befallen The Pink Panther’s Inspector Clouseau.

Throughout her career, Fillières also worked repeatedly with members of her actual family, including her sister and later her daughter Agathe Bonitzer; a quality of family joking permeates the films, which seem couched almost in a private language, as if wilfully partaking in the madness they portray. Running gags often make the leap from one film to the next: one character after another claims to have given up smoking, only to beg for a cigarette when stress kicks in. Even Barbie’s pink sneakers strongly resemble those worn by Sandrine Kiberlain in the 2018 La Belle et la Belle—and also, according to Jaoui, by the filmmaker herself.

To note these repetitions isn’t to deny Fillières’ comic range. One side of her inventiveness is verbal: not all her wordplay survives translation, but no knowledge of French is needed to appreciate her mastery of the non-sequitur, displayed at its finest in Un chat un chat, where a typical stretch of dialogue veers from synchronised swimming (“The nose-peg was too much”) to an attack on the Rosicrucians (“Their kids only get wooden toys. You wash your hands all day. Lunatics”). Misunderstandings are frequent, with proper names a reliable source of confusion: a suspiciously high proportion of characters go by more than one name, while others have to share a name with someone else. A favourite scene, repeated with variations, involves old acquaintances who meet and start to reminisce, then start to suspect that each has misrecognised the other. “That wasn’t me,” Barbie eventually has to tell one such deceptively familiar stranger. “It probably wasn’t you, either.”

Tying in with this, the physical comedy of the films goes beyond the occasional moments of outright slapstick: Fillières’ ingenuity is especially evident in her staging of encounters between her characters, a matter of mise-en-scène in the most traditional sense. One instance in Ma vie ma gueule occurs early on: Barbie is seated alone on a bench, back-to-back with a pair of gossiping teenage girls on a second bench faced the opposite way. Gradually it dawns on her that one of these girls is her daughter, and that she herself is the subject of their conversation, which includes disparaging comments about her lack of a sex life. Clearly, she has to put a stop to this—but clearly, too, it would be better not to reveal she’s been eavesdropping. So she rises from the bench, steals away, then heads back the way she came, walking in front of the girls as if she just happened to be passing by…

Nor is it just Fillières’ characters who are called upon to perform discreet manoeuvres of this sort. Her particular filmmaking touch might be seen as a balance between discretion and bluntness, especially when it comes to kinship relations and how they’re defined (men move in and out of her heroines’ lives, but she’s at least as interested in tensions between parents and children, or between women who could imaginably be mother and daughter). Equally, she might be seen as balancing word and image, or the abstract and the concrete. Bodily functions are often discussed but visual gross-outs are strategically rarer; sex is constantly evoked, but seldom if ever directly shown.

Yet the films do sometimes show us startling things, such as the baby boy in Aïe, naked from the waist down, who has a portion of a rotting umbilical cord protruding from his navel, the kind of disconcerting anatomical reality the codes of civilisation seem specifically intended to repress. Confronting such realities head-on, or avoiding them altogether, are two equally risky strategies in a game involving an effectively infinite number of levels and pieces, where the first rule dictates that many of the later rules can’t be articulated, or not in so many words. It could drive a person crazy, trying to sort all that out.

Fillières’ most direct precursor in French cinema is another filmmaker who died young, the widely beloved yet also now somewhat underrated François Truffaut, who shares her lightness and briskness, her knack for small surprises, her fascination with words and authorship, her obsessive yet easily distracted protagonists, and her sensitivity to the irrational, viewed often but not always as a force to be kept at bay. Along with all that, both possess what can be called a Rousseauist side: a suspicion, however ambivalent, that the best chance for human fulfilment is to escape society and its expectations altogether, or at least a willingness to dream it might be so.

This dream in Fillières’ work takes the form of a joke, but a joke kept running long enough to suggest she was tempted to take it seriously. In one film after another, characters yearn to get out of Paris, where they can’t seem to stop bumping into people, and to escape to some idealised realm of solitude, whether the woods or the Antarctic or a hotel room in Japan. Un chat un chat finds room for a literal philosophical disquisition about Rousseau, included as a tease—like the moment in If You Don’t I Will when Pomme randomly gives her name to a stranger as “Gena Rowlands,” leaving us to join the dots between Rowlands’ role in A Woman Under the Influence, directed by her husband John Cassavetes, and Pomme’s own choice to step outside both her collapsing marriage and any conventional notion of sanity.

Pomme hasn’t altogether lost her mind, but she really does go and live in the woods for a week or so, thus finding the courage to start anew. Barbie’s solution to her difficulties is still more drastic: leaving the clinic and her children behind, she crosses the Channel by ferry, calls on an old friend, then embarks by train for the Scottish Highlands, where for a small sum she’s able to purchase a single square yard of land, which comes with a certificate of ownership and the honorary title “Lady Bichette”.

On the face of it, this acquisition is of no earthly use; even camping is prohibited. But it’s all hers, allowing her to stand proudly at the centre of her own domain, as if she’d reached the edge of the world and could go no further (though the film has a couple of additional surprises in store). Her madness has won, or we could see it that way. But as she breathes the clean air and looks toward the horizon, we have the option to identify fully with her triumph, her sense of being home free.

Special thanks to David Heslin.