“Anaïs in Love,” the 2021 debut feature by writer-director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet , was a sunny portrait of idealized French womanhood that turned cooler and stranger the longer you stayed with it: Its title character, outwardly a maddeningly winsome ingenue of a particularly Gallic stripe, revealed layers of insecurity and instability we didn’t see coming, and the film itself wound up with more to say than it initially let on. If it proved a small but deft exercise in finding a character from the outside in, however, Bourgeois-Tacquet’s meatier follow-up “A Woman’s Life” doesn’t try the same bait-and-switch: This time, the filmmaker’s subject is an older woman who knows exactly who she is, and bristles at anyone who won’t accept those terms.

“A Woman’s Life” is thus a film as different from “Anaïs in Love” as its star Léa Drucker is from the latter’s lead Anaïs Demoustier: direct and tough-minded rather than soft and capricious, but with a jaded wit and sexuality that warms up proceedings, giving verve…