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Chicago – Few semi-autobiographical explorations of high-stakes drama have ever been as playfully exuberant as Valérie Donzelli’s “Declaration of War.” Like Jonathan Levine and Will Reiser’s equally sublime “50/50,” this film is based directly on the real-life experiences of people who faced a cancer diagnosis and lived to tell the tale. Both pictures resist mawkish sentiment while delving into the rich textures and eccentricities of life.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

Whereas Reiser’s script was reminiscent of Judd Apatow’s signature brand of humanistic and improvisational comedy, Donzelli’s script (which she wrote with her co-star and real-life lover, Jérémie Elkaïm) appears to have been inspired largely by the experimental whimsy of François Truffaut. Initially, the dramatic tonal shifts are somewhat jarring, and there are moments when the film veers into distractingly twee territory. Yet for the most part, Donzelli strikes a remarkable balance between seriousness and irreverence, with occasional doses of unexpected surrealism.

Jérémie Elkaïm, Valérie Donzelli, Declaration of War La Guerre est déclarée / Declaration of War is France's submission for the 2012 Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. The second feature film directed by actress-turned-filmmaker Valérie Donzelli (Who Killed Bambi?, The Untouchable), who also co-wrote it with her former real-life companion Jérémie Elkaïm (perhaps best known in the Us for the 2000 gay drama Come Undone), Declaration of War is a tear-jerking family drama inspired by events in their own lives. In the film, Donzelli and Elkaïm play a young couple, Roméo and Juliette, whose baby (at the age of 8 played by the couple's real-life son, Gabriel Elkaïm) has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Roméo and Juliette then proceed to declare war against death while struggling to save their own relationship as well. (The French-language title sounds like a pun on the title of Alain Resnais' 1966 classic La guerre est finie / The War Is Over.