A depressed Parisian finds herself straddled with an exuberant young American man during the Paris Olympics.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Laurent Slama
Starring: Agathe Rousselle, Alex Lawther, Suzy Bemba, Jonas Bachan
I often wonder if the setup of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise could work today. Would Celine and Jesse strike up a conversation on a train or simply stare at their phones for the whole journey, their faces sandwiched by giant headphones to deter any strangers from making contact? The sort of impromptu encounters that introduced many of our parents to each other have largely become a thing of the past. Many young people have been thought that strangers are to be avoided and feared, and there are enough distractions in the noisy modern world to keep strangers from becoming lovers, or even friends.
Laurent Slama's feature debut A Second Life is something of a platonic, very modern cousin of Linklater's film. It opens with a Wong Kar-Wai-inspired image of its lead - Agathe Rousselle's Elisabeth - standing motionless in a Paris street as the masses move around her. In a rather needless voiceover Elisabeth speaks of the depression she has felt since the break-up of a relationship months earlier. We then see her ask an AI chat programme for advice on ending her life, a request the software refuses to indulge.
A computer tells Elisabeth not to kill herself, but what she really needs is a human to tell her to live. Deciding to put her demise on hold for another day, Elisabeth heads to her unsatisfying job as a concierge for Parisian rental apartments. This sees her meet and greet tourists, present them with a complimentary baguette and in this case, hope they don't complain about being charged three times the normal rate as it's the opening day of the 2024 Paris Olympics. Elisabeth is terrible at her job. She finds it impossible to feign a smile, and her clients regularly give her low ratings in online feedback. But she needs to keep the job in order to have her visa renewed (Elisabeth is surprisingly revealed to be an American despite being played by Rousselle, an actress who couldn't appear more French if she donned a beret and wore a string of onions around her shoulders).
Among the clients Elisabeth has to deal with on this stressful day is Elijah (Alex Lawther), a free-spirited, pink-haired American who is in town to help some of the competing athletes mentally prepare for the big event. When the apartment meant for Elijah is mistakenly rented to another tourist, Elisabeth finds herself straddled with the happy-go-lucky American, who insists on following her around like a puppy dog for the day.
Though she initially finds Elijah's American exuberance annoying, Elisabeth is forced to open up by his probing questions and lack of a filter. Working in the field of psychology, Elijah immediately twigs that all is not well with Elisabeth. He attaches himself to this troubled young woman like an angel to a desperate man stood on a bridge. The pair have an odd couple frisson at first (which would make more sense if the film had made Elisabeth French, or at least another European) but Elisabeth warms to this young man who seems able to enjoy the world in a way she's forgotten.
Elisabeth regularly visits a museum to admire Monet's water lillies, but it takes Elijah to bring her to the pond that inspired them. She has ignored the world around her and its beauty. She wants to stay in Paris but she doesn't appreciate the city until Elijah helps her to see it through the eyes of a visitor.
There are moments of contrived drama that don't quite work and making Elisabeth hearing impaired comes off as a narrative gimmick, leading to a melodramatic scene where she loses her hearing aid in a crowded area. The movie works best when it sticks to the simple central conceit of a lonely woman finding a friend, and it's refreshing that there's no hint of anything more overtly romantic between the leads (both are somewhat queer-coded). Rousselle is very good at portraying a woman struggling to maintain a tough exterior while she's crumbling inside. Cast against type, English actor Lawther is surprisingly convincing as the golly-gee-whiz Elijah. By the end of the movie we suspect Elisabeth and Elijah will likely never see one another again but that this one day spent together will have a profoundly positive impact on a woman who began her morning believing she had nothing to live for.
