Ma vie sans moi

Ann lives in a trailer with her considerate but not very thought-provoking husband and their two children. The trailer is very crowded and so is Anna's life. A mother at 17 Anna has never had any time to ponder about her life but she knows it might not be very fulfilling. When she finds out that she is terminally ill she has to face the choices she has made and that was made for her. She decides to make a list of all the things she wants do in the short time she has left, both big and small. This is where Mark Ruffalos character, a considerate and thought-provoking love-interest, makes an entrance.

This films moves slowly towards the inevitable end without ever becoming boring. The relationships between the characters are displayed by emotions and subtlety rather than words. The film has a very sad theme but is in many ways very hopeful. It shows that life can trap people down but also that every person has something special which can be used to change lives. I found this film to be warm, unsentimental, thoughtful, sad and uplifting. A bit like life itself.

If you liked this film as much as I did I can recommend Wilbur wants to kill himself and Before sunset.

Really, this film should be too much to bear. An attractive young mother discovers she has 2 months to live and sets about trying to make use of her time doing things for herself and the people she loves; but keeping her diagnosis to herself. The film intentionally concentrates on the start of this period, allowing it to soft-focus the pain, and from a certain perspective, everything works out with an almost synthetic convenience. And yet this is a great film. All the performances are spot on (even Debbie Harry is great against type), and it's full of humour, not black death-defying humour but the life-affirming humour of everyday life. Additionally, the film is wonderfully constructed, both in the skill with which it moves between scenes and also in the larger way the story in told (the entire plot is structured around an eventual suicide that is only implied) - cloyingness is averted through the confidence the director has in the tale and the cast. Death is surely never this romantic, but in its own way this film is as harrying as Mike Nicholls' 'Wit'. A painful film, but one that makes you glad to be alive.

MY LIFE WITHOUT ME (2003) ***1/2 Sarah Polley, Mark Ruffalo, Scott Speedman, Deborah Harry, Amanda Plummer, Leonor Watling, Julian Richings, Maria de Medeiros, Jessica Amlee, Kenya Jo Kennedy, Alfred Molina. Polley gives a remarkable performance as a young wife and mother who is diagnosed with terminal cancer and with the few precious months left to her own devices she decides not to tell anyone but instead attempts to live life by her own guidelines including taking a lover (Ruffalo in a genial turn) and setting her family up with a new mother figure in the form of new next door neighbor Watling (who gives a heartrending speech about her occupation as a nurse) and in the process realizing just how important it is to live life each day as if it were indeed your last. Director Isabel Coixet adapts Nanci Kincaid's short story 'Pretending the Bed is a Raft' with clear-eyed sharpness allowing the ultimate heartbreak to occur off-screen and instead focusing on the funny and poignant pangs her protagonist silently endures. A real gem that reminded me of the '70s golden age of indies.

This is without a doubt, the saddest, but most beautiful movie I have ever seen. It really touched me. The acting is superb, the plot heartrending and thought provoking, and the cinematography outstanding. I spent 2 hours blubbering like a schoolgirl, and it was worth every second. The simple fact that one's life can seem not to have started until the point where one's own mortality is realized is a revelation to me. This movie has opened my eyes to the importance of life and love. Money, power, fame, all are fleeting and can be lost in a moment to illness, famine, war, or fate. It is those around us, and our relationships to them, that are the things to be held most dear in our final accounting.

"My Life Without Me" shows off Sarah Polley's beauty and acting that has been clear to her fans since her "Avonlea" days.

In writer/director Isabel Coixet's first English language feature, Polley takes what could have been a drippy, maudlin story of a dying young mother and turns it into a clear-eyed path to accepting early death and taking charge of the hand that's dealt you. This delicate view is in sharp contrast to Hollywood tripe like "Sweet November" where beautiful healthy women in denial die of Movie Star Disease.

When Polley's "Ann" gets her death sentence from a doctor who can't even look her in the eyes, she resolves, among other items on her "To Do Before I Die" list, to tell it like it is -- but finds that instead everyone around her spills out their inner-most problems and she doesn't get to, including an amusing effort to get a Milli Vanilli-loving hairdresser to cut her hair like she wants it. Perhaps it's because she chooses to lie to them about her imminent demise. Not only does Polley get to use her full-fledged Canadian accent complete with "Eh"s, but until I read it on her imdb bio I didn't know that when she was 11 Polley lost her mother to cancer, so she must have had personal experience to draw on.

The imdb credits do not include that the script is based on a short story by Nanci Kincaid, "Pretending the Bed is a Raft," with additional inspiration from a poem about a young women's death by John Berger, who is thanked prominently in the credits. The symbolism of Ann having met her husband at the last Nirvana concert is also played upon several times.

The music selections are lovely, both the romantic-sounding European ballads from one character's sister's DJ mix tape and the original music by Alfonso Vilallonga, that are poignant and keep out the schmaltz.

Polley's supporting actors are wonderful, from the lively children to Amanda Plummer, who has been MIA from films for a while, and Debbie Harry as the depressed mother.

There's a couple of resonances of the TV show "Felicity" as not only does "Ann" leave voiced-over audio tapes to her loved ones, but, yikes, even dying, "Ann" gets both gorgeous sensitive hunks Scott Speadmen and Mark Ruffalo to love her. It's effectively shown, though, that one was the love of an adolescence that ended too soon with parental responsibilities and the other of her too-short adulthood.