“You have to always be drunk. That’s all there is to it. Not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth. You have to be continually drunk.”
So begins A Second Life, a new French film directed and co-written (with Thomas Keumurian) by Laurent Slama, who made his first two films under the pseudonym Elisabeth Vogler, a name taken from Ingmar Bergman’s movie Persona.
The character in Bergman’s Persona (played by Liv Ullmann) is an actor who suddenly stops speaking, while with an oblique continuity, a character named Elisabeth Vogler (Agathe Rouselle) in A Second Life has lost most of her hearing due to an illness. It is Rouselle who speaks the lines that open Slama’s film while her character is preparing to take her own life in the dim morning light.
Instead of following through, howevever, our Elisabeth—a reflective character, with an intense melancholy about her and a deep sense of loss and isolation—goes to work.
Deciding to continue on, she narrates the things she has been drunk on: sunrises, work, sound, beauty, love. These categories sum up much of the cinematic appeal of this whimsically evocative film and its sensuous use of sound and silence, isolation and community, and movement and stasis.
Elisabeth is working in Paris during the 2024 Olympic Games. We follow her on a hectic and grueling schedule of getting tourists into their temporary apartments while getting real-time reviews, stressful check-ins, and updates from her boss.
When she’s not running around in this frenzied hustle, she can be found in a museum gazing at Monet’s Water Lilies.
Slama knows when to take his time, and when to speed things up with his varied and masterful cinematography.”
In the course of the film’s long day, Elisabeth meets Elijah (Alex Lawther), a seemingly flighty Californian who is in Paris to help athletes with mental performance. Elijah has an overall soft cuddly look to him with light colors (even a pink tone in his hair) in stark contrast to Elisabeth’s darker colors and more angular appearance with subtle but sharp tattoos on her wiry arms.
Elijah sticks with her throughout her day, acting as a disruptor to her fast-moving insular world. He is also a hypnotist, and though Elisabeth claims she’s resistant, she is gently mesmerized to sleep in a lush Parisian park. In a magical feat of editing, the rich green of the trees and a hill mirrored in a pond morph into Monet’s painting.
Later the pair is joined by Chad and Naomi (Jonas Bachan and Suzy Bemba) for a chaotic trek through the City of Lights from day into nightfall.
Elijah and his friends revel in the exuberance of life, and eventually Elisabeth is swept up in their odyssey. The film peaks at a massive rave-like festival for the Opening Ceremony of the Games. The clashing energy between Rouselle and Lawther eventually harmonizes as the characters’ relationship develops.
‘A Second Life’ is a pleasure to watch, featuring great acting performances, hypnotic audiovisual sequences, and a rhythmic flow from despair to hope.”
Slama also is the film’s cinematographer, and the visual narrative he creates blends perfectly with Jean-Charles Bastion’s varied soundtrack, especially in scenes like the quartet gliding through Paris on electric bikes to dreamy music.
Slama knows when to take his time, and when to speed things up with his varied and masterful cinematography.
A Second Life is a pleasure to watch, featuring great acting performances, hypnotic audiovisual sequences, and a rhythmic flow from despair to hope.
Editor’s Note: A Second Life, sponsored by Sky River RV and Cambria Pines Lodge, is one of eight full-length films to be screened during the ninth annual Cambria Film Festival February 4-8.