James Y. Lee
Call me cynical, but the nascently sentimental breed of independent film—often romantic, sometimes not—emphasizing the need for connection or inner solace amid the hustle and bustle of modern life feels like it’s growing more disingenuous over time. Films the likes of The Sun Is Also a Star and Into the Wild prove to be particularly sanitized examples of how real struggles and potent concerns about the noise of our current era are being boiled down to dramatic objects, mere conduits for the message that these kinds of films often want to tell; that often, the capitalist or technological obligations dragging us down are keeping us away from the things in life that matter. That intention is well-considered, but the poison is in a level of execution that opts to skirt any real acknowledgment of those burdensome obligations, all of which is in service of the final takeaway in question that the filmmakers deem to be heartwarming or uplifting. And while Laurent Slama’s Tribeca-premiering film, A Second Life, isn’t quite smarmy enough to qualify for this sort of scarlet-letter indie genre label, it still comes dangerously close to professing this kind of false solace at multiple points.
It reads more like a platonic rendition of Before Sunrise—two strangers who encounter each other in a European city and form some kind of meaningful connection that fills in each others’ vacancies while they spend no longer than a day exploring said city’s various regions. Here, that city is Paris—and as if to raise the stakes just a little further, it’s set smack in the middle of the 2025 Paris Olympics.
A rapidly edited opening introduces us to Elisabeth (Titane’s Agathe Rousselle), a woman so plagued completely by depression—as a result of a recent brutal heartbreak and the onset of a disease that’s stolen her hearing—that among the first things we see her do is just barely walk away from the brink of deliberately swallowing a lethal mixture of crushed pills in a glass of water. She’s an employee for a luxury apartment rental service, introducing various clients to considerably lofty places for them to stay during the Olympic Games, and it’s clear that many of the people she meets have no interest in genuinely conversing with her, a few of them helplessly chained to—God forbid!—their cellphones, all throughout the apartment tours she takes them on.
But she can’t just walk away willingly; she needs the job to extend her visa to stay in France for as long as possible, as someone who has a U.S. passport and was born and raised in various countries. She’s also demonstrated a history of technologic proficiency, the vast majority of which is the result of her own self-taught efforts, but has also drawn her into corners of the ever-nascent generative AI industry. In fact, it’s such a prominent part of her life that even ChatGPT is briefly incorporated—in a rather on-the-nose manner—as something she consults right before her eventually reneged suicide attempt.
As fate would have it, one of the clients she runs into is Elijah (Alex Lawther), a Californian hypnosis specialist who’s come to Paris with two of his friends to help psychologically prepare athletes for their competitions. He’s about as inverse from Elisabeth as it gets; a total free spirit, well-connected with his friends, dyed with pink hair and with a looser informal appearance, and unabashedly welcoming of Elisabeth’s general presence regardless of her occupation. Thus, a deeply spontaneous journey down the streets and corners of Paris in one of its most bustling, busy days serves as a conduit for Elisabeth’s gradual awakening to the more simple joys of life, with the help of Elijah and his ragtag group of misfits.
Dramatically speaking, the first half or so of Elisabeth and Elijah’s dynamic is one built on annoyance, where Elijah’s continuous attempts to ingratiate a cold and reticent Elisabeth into the fold of his friend group only serves to further irritate Elisabeth, who’s being tugged around from client to client and complaint to complaint, and repeatedly tells him to return to his rental with his keys so many times to the point where said repetition feels like an oversight. An eventual midpoint turn—which heightens Elisabeth’s awareness of how devastating her hearing loss is, and also shows Elijah’s anxiety rising to an unmanageable extent—loosens things up a little for the two’s relationship, and allows them to try and open up further to each other for the rest of the story. But by then, the resolutions that Elisabeth starts to wind up reaching feel like they far too naturally to her; the cloud that we know is likely to lift from her spirits feels like it lifts too absolutely, too fast. All of this would be more digestible in a format where a film like this were willing and daring enough to actually plumb the further depths of Elisabeth—and eventually, as we glimpse, Elijah’s—pain.
Rousselle and Lawther deserve credit, however, for imbuing as much charm and humanity into these characters and their simplified journeys to reawakening as they possibly can. Lawther in particular steers Elijah away from becoming a deeply grating stereotype, instead partially playing into some of the charm behind the annoyance that someone as unabashedly outgoing as him might often present, while also making sure that the vulnerabilities he displays are done with relative seriousness. Rousselle’s turn as Elisabeth here is a far cry from the physically contorting and emotionally revelatory turn she displayed in Julia Ducournau’s Titane, but she’s still considerably impressive to watch here nonetheless, as moments of hesitation, repression, and uncertainty are by far the instances where Elisabeth’s character shines most, as a result of Rousselle’s incredible control over her character’s reticent mannerisms.
And yet, in terms of the rest of the movie that surrounds them, A Second Life remains a dramatically anodyne experience, where even on a formal and visual level, there’s very little about the film that excels. In the wake of Sound of Metal, it’s hard to digest a film like this where Elisabeth’s hearing loss and impediments are boiled down to mostly blurred noises, and opportunities to take immersive instances of disruption further aren’t fully committed to, especially in scenes where it feels like the audience should still be reasonably inhabiting her sensorial perspective. And if we are to remain on the same train of Before Sunrise comparisons, the dialogue of A Second Life barely matches the rhythm of Linklater’s opus, less interested in the myriad ways that the two protagonists can play ideas off of each other, and more intrigued by the one-note concepts they can represent for each other. It’s a real shame for a film that could have possessed so much significance about how loneliness and depression can be staved off and treated with grace in our deeply graceless current period—because it instead opts to deal with these plagues as things we can mostly overcome in a night instead of meaningfully persevere through day by day.
