We’ve all felt depressed. It’s a fact that sometimes life will get you down, and if you let it, depression and anxiety can isolate you from having any meaningful relationships. The luckiest of us have only had fleeting experience with this, but all of us have felt it at one time or another. A Second Life is a new film from writer/director Laurent Slama and co-writer Thomas Keumurian about a young woman in such a place and how, over the course of even a single day, things can at least begin to turn around.
Elisabeth (Titane‘s Agathe Rousselle) works for a short-term rental company. Her job is to welcome guests to their new accommodations, show them the amenities, and ensure their needs are met. She clearly hates this job, but despite having a French accent, she is American, and without employment, she is in danger of being deported.
This pressure has left Elisabeth reeling. Tormented by anxiety, she is curt with customers and only finds peace in two ways: staring at Monet’s “Water Lilies” and removing her hearing aids and shutting out the world for a few minutes at a time.
This day is hectic as the Paris Olympics are starting, and she is running from apartment to apartment, cleaning, meeting people, and taking calls from her pushy boss. It’s almost too much to take, and then she meets Elijah (Alex Lawther), a young American in town to help athletes mentally prepare. His apartment is double-booked, so she arranges a better place on the other side of the city and offers to meet him there, but he refuses and walks with her.
The rest of the film is simply that: two people walking and talking. She, depressed and closed off to people, and he, effervescent, emotional, insightful, and able to connect with such ease as to be almost off-putting. Their meandering conversation wanders through topics about life in general, living in Paris, and their respective histories and emotional states. Slowly but surely, Elisabeth begins to open up.
A film so dialogue-heavy requires great performers to pull it off. Lawther’s Elijah is perhaps the most stereotypical manic pixie dream boy committed to film in the last 20 years, but he’s so earnest and effortless it’s hard to hold that against him.
Rousselle proves her range after her breakthrough in Titane, with this film requiring an openness and honesty that can be difficult to achieve, especially in a language not one’s own. She nails the body language of a person who believes they’re calm and collected on the outside but is, in actuality, barely concealing their inner tumult. Later in the film, when she begins to connect, it’s incredibly cathartic, and you can see all the emotions she is feeling on her face and in her eyes. This movie should cement her near the top of everyone’s “I’ll watch this person in anything” list.
The film’s most significant strength is actually its cinematography and sound design, though. The camera moves in and out of crowds with the characters, making you feel like you might be walking the streets with the character. In the moments when Elisabeth is without her hearing aids, the sound design shifts to give us a better sense of her world. At times it’s a comfort, and at others it implies a horror, but in combination with Rousselle’s performance it’s incredibly effective at putting one in her headspace.
A Second Life is a lovely little film. It’s beautifully captured and life-affirming. Its one-day structure and short runtime –just 77 minutes– mean that it never wears out its welcome, and maximises its impact. It’s a hangout movie and a vibes movie, and one that will make you want to call your friends.
