The main value of A Second Life is that parts of it were shot on the street in Paris on the day of the 2024 Olympics opening ceremony. This is therefore a movie that will be revisited fifty years from now as an important document of that moment. The rest of A Second Life can’t quite match up to that concept, but you cannot fault the ambition here.
Elisabeth (Agathe Rousselle, whose work in Titane will never be forgotten) is having a tough time. She is working for a concierge company, managing short-term lets for people in the city for the games, and dependent on their star ratings to keep her job and therefore her visa. She is an American, despite her French name and language skills, though one who was raised around the world by parents who have settled elsewhere. One of her clients is Elijah (a very good Alex Lawther), a pink-haired Californian thrilled to be in Paris. But he is at such a loose end that he invites himself to accompany Elisabeth on her rounds. Elisabeth does not have the bandwidth to take on this young man on the busiest day of the decade, but Elijah will not be denied. He also proves himself to be unusually good at handling some of Elisabeth’s more difficult customers. So Elisabeth warms to him despite herself. They swiftly gain an entourage, married Americans Naomi (Suzy Bemba) and Chad (Jonas Bachan), since Elijah is the kind of person who could make friends in an empty room. But Elisabeth is not.
Elisabeth is also hard of hearing, and how she uses her hearing aids to alter how she moves through the city is an important subplot. Olivier Voisin’s excellent sound design largely reflects what Elisabeth is hearing, and cleverly demonstrates how tough it can be for her to exist in public. She doesn’t like them to be noticed either, and there’s plenty of time to ponder if the chip on her shoulder was caused by her hearing difficulties, or the other way around. Ms. Rousselle does fine work as a woman who has been compelled to make her own way in the world and who sees asking for help as dangerous. Elijah is Elisabeth’s perfect counterpoint. Mr. Lawther manages to give a character that could just have been cloying a core of glass, which is meant as a compliment. The big twist – revealed in a conversation on one of Paris’ bridges – is that Elijah’s openness to the world is as much of a painful choice as Elisabeth’s guarded solitude. Maybe neither of them are best served by their attitudes. But maybe both of them needed to meet in order to figure this out.
Writer-director-cinematographer Laurent Slama is to be commended for pulling off these nuanced scenes shot on crowded streets in real time. It’s not perfect – the subplot around Elisabeth’s coding skills should have been dropped, because all that does it make you wonder why she’s wasting her energy in this concierge job – but this kind of ambition is the perfect metaphor for a film set around the Olympics. So what it didn’t entirely succeed at something very difficult? We should still appreciate the talent and ambition it took to try, and besides, it came very close to being something sublime. We can all sympathise with someone who falls short in the moment, and we can all enjoy the performances here for exactly what they are. July and August 2024 will never happen again, but A Second Life lives on as a powerful memory of those moments.
A Second Life recently played at the Glasgow Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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