Strange way to find strength

Here's a strange thing: a film about dying young that isn't mawkish, a tearjerker that doesn't jerk.

The female- dominated story follows 23-year-old Ann (Sarah Polley), who works as a school cleaner and lives in a trailer in the back garden of her embittered mother (Deborah Harry). She lives with husband, Don (Scott Speedman), who was her childhood sweetheart, and their two young daughters in overcrowded, vivid warmth. In spite of the family's commitments and near penury, they remain in the first flush of romance.

Thinking that she may be pregnant again, Ann visits hospital for a check-up and is told that she has ovarian cancer. Had she been 20 years older the tumour might not have spread so fast and would have been operable. Her very youthfulness will kill her within two months.

Ann tells no one and starts making lists of things to do before she dies; these include the usual laughgrabbers, such as smoke, drink, make love to another man (just to see what it is like), and some heart-wrenchers such as "find another wife for my husband".

Through a series of quietly expressed and telling scenes, director Isabel Coixet steers a sure path between sentimentality and mawkishness: imminent death in the movies has rarely generated such humanity, such humour or such strength.

Coixet, who shot the picture in the rarely filmed suburbs of Vancouver, never once lets the material escape from her. Her cast is unusually integrated: among the many extraordinary performances are the doctor (Julian Richings) who cannot bear to tell his patients they are dying, Mark Ruffalo as the lover, and Ann's new neighbour (Leonor Watling), who, in a virtuoso scene, delivers one of the most moving speeches I have witnessed all year.

My Life Without Me
Cert: cert15