French actress Sylvie Testud (‘Karnaval’, ‘Stupeurs et tremblements’ and ‘Lourdes’) makes her director debut with her self-written script called ‘La Vie d’Une Autre’. The 25-year old Marie Speranski (Juliette Binoche) meets the love of her life, the cartoonist Paul (Mathieu Kassovitz) and they end up in bed. When she wakes op ‘the next day’, Marie is suddenly a 41-year old woman with a son, a husband named Paul and a beautiful apartment, yet she does not recall the last 16 years at all.

Trying to figure out what happened, Marie brings her son to school, helps the house cleaner and sends the nanny home early to cook dinner herself. But due to the surprised responses on her kind attitude, she finds out she has become a successful, but strict and harsh businesswoman. Also, where she expects to be at the beginning of a perfect romance, she is actually the middle of a divorce.

Sylvie Testud succeeds in a reasonable balance between drama and humor. Some of the funny situations are not very convincing, like when Marie finds out about the euro, the smoking ban in restaurants and the high-tech developments in cars. Besides it is not very likely that Marie decides not to tell anyone about her memory-loss, but tries to bluff through all her ignorance. Nevertheless, PAC film ‘La Vie d’Une Autre’ is definitely worth seeing in cinema, only if for the adorable kid who plays Marie’s son!

(Note to our non-French or Dutch speaking readers: we had a hard time retrieving the trailer with English subtitles, hence the trailer above has Dutch subtitles)