Have you ever seen life as a sequential compilation of absurdities and events that can hardly be explained reasonably?

In the epicentre of her mid-’50s’ crisis, Barberie “Barbie” Bichette receives metaphorical punch after punch with an unrestrained grace, turning her emotional instability into humour. With her social filters deactivated, every conversation with Barbie promises a lively experience.

This Life of Mine (Ma Vie Ma Gueule), which premiered in Australia at this year’s Alliance Française French Film Festival, represents late director and screenwriter Sophie Fillières’ last film.

The 58-year-old, who had an esteemed career in French independent cinema (with a special talent for complex characters combining drama, humour or existential angst), died of cancer in 2023.

Cinema and literature often present interesting stories of characters going though crisis, a lack of meaning, loneliness or other personal struggles. Many of these follow a structure of binary state change: the person goes from a state of being an unproductive and “dysfunctional” individual, and then either succeeds or fails in arriving to the other state: becoming an emotionally stable and productive person. This Life of Mine doesn’t fit into this architecture at all.

One of the few things transparently conveyed about the character of Barbie is her fear of death. Apart from her frequent visits to an unhinged and insufferable psychologist, this obsession with death is portrayed in increasingly comic ways.

Fillières wants us to keep identifying with Barbie in strange ways during her moments of honest lucidity.

When she’s sitting in a school corridor next to a student outside the principal’s office, for example, and her sister (the principal) calls Barbie in, she insists that the boy can go in first. After the principal’s insistence and once they are both in the office, Barbie tells her that when she is at an appointment and there’s other people outside waiting to come in, she has the scary feeling her time is limited.

In another scene, a man from her past recognises Barbie on the terrace of a bistro and approaches her. But despite the strong bond they once shared – as revealed later in the film – Barbie is not only unable to remember him but believes he is an incarnation of death itself.

In a hilarious, beyond surreal, conversation, Barbie feels unwell and asks the man to call an ambulance. She will subsequently be admitted to a mental hospital.

Throughout the film, the audience is left wondering who Barbie is and why she does all the erratic things she does. Once in the mental hospital, you might think the debate settled. But, director Fillières wants us to keep identifying with Barbie in strange ways during her moments of honest lucidity, making categorising her insane difficult to digest.

The film beautifully describes the paradox of regret over something forgotten: once the qualities of the memory erased, there is no reference point from which pain can emanate.

This Life of Mine (2024) is about the resilience power of a person in crisis, and about how humour renders most things in life largely ridiculous.

Main image supplied.