Stories of Women’s Lives--Especially Her Own : Film: Acclaimed French writer-director Diane Kurys comes to terms with her childhood in ‘C’est la Vie.’

“C’est la Vie,� her fifth film, opened the Women in Film Festival two weeks ago. But if you call Diane Kurys a woman director , be prepared for some verbal fireworks.

“I’m a woman so I have to be a feminist,� Kurys says, in excellent if heavily accented English, sipping coffee at the Four Seasons Hotel as she awaited the L.A. opening of “C’est la Vie.� “But I resent the idea of being grouped with women. I’d rather belong to a club of short filmmakers or blue-eyed filmmakers.

“Focusing on the misogyny breaks my confidence, impedes my work,� says the 41-year-old director. “I don’t want to use it as a weapon or an excuse. Besides, in many people’s minds, a “women’s film� is smaller, intimate--a synonym for boring. Categorizing minimizes my work, reducing it in scale and putting it in a ghetto.�

Throughout her career, Kurys has tried to tap universal themes. Using her own life as inspiration, she combines a heavy dose of autobiography with touches of comic and dramatic invention. Reading biographies and listening to friends adds to the mix. “I’m like a sponge,� she says with a smile. “I steal other people’s memories too.�

“Peppermint Soda,� which won the French equivalent of the Oscar for Kurys in the late ‘70s, tackled her coming of age at a stuffy Parisian high school. Two years later, she recorded her immersion into the radical politics of 1968 Paris in the less well-received “Cocktail Molotov.� “Entre Nous� (1983), an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, documented the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, while 1987’s “A Man in Love� grappled not only with the subject of filmmaking and writing, but the death of her mother from cancer.

“C’est la Vie� picks up where “Entre Nous� left off, exploring the divorce--and consequent loss of innocence--from the daughters’ point of view. Written in a month, it’s a melange of memories consciously stored on the beach in 1958 Brittany: playing “doctor� with a family friend, tying her shoelaces for the first time, abandoning the family dog--a vivid record of a summer vacation away from Lyons, to which Kurys, her mother and her sister never returned.

“I tried to capture the pain and desperation of the time,� she says. “The adults whispering behind us. The feeling that something big, something we couldn’t understand, was going on. Some scenes, such as the one in which my father beat my mother, were made up. But all the emotions were real.�

A movie addict as a child, Kurys still finds filmmaking a source of release--a form of cinematic therapy. Still, she says, it was working with young people again--not exorcising the demons of divorce--that was the primary appeal. “If you direct them well, children have an innocence and vulnerability, a natural star quality with which even major actors have difficulty competing,� says the effervescent Kurys, looking quasi-adolescent herself with her oversize charcoal-gray sweater, black stretch pants and mop of caramel curls.

“It’s something between spiritual and chemical.�

Coincidentally, she became pregnant herself during the first week of the shoot, giving birth to her first child (fathered by her companion of 25 years, director Alexandre Arcady) in May.

“This film helped me come to terms with my childhood at the same time as I became a mother. It’s very bizarre.�

Like “Entre Nous,� the $5-million “C’est la Vie� features Lena (Natalie Baye), a character based on Kurys’ mother, a strong-willed woman who deserted a devoted husband to search for fulfillment in Paris. As always, Kurys sidesteps the tendency to paint culprits and victims, opting instead for shades of gray.

“I try not to take sides with any of my characters,� she says. “I put myself in each of their shoes. Mother was very courageous and independent, but also quite selfish. She killed my father, destroyed his life. He became a wounded bear and never married again. ‘Entre Nous’ ended on a note of hope, the promise of a better life. This one ends sadly--a child looking at a father who is suffering, starting to realize that she’d be suffering herself.�

Kurys felt pain of another sort when critics lashed into her last film, “A Man in Love.� Starring Peter Coyote and Greta Scacchi as illicit lovers on an Italian movie set, it was her first English-language film and the only one to take place in the present.

“I was hurt by the reaction,� she says, “because the film was so personal. I’d been an actress who took up writing. I’d lost my mother to cancer. In previous films, I had exposed myself as a child, but in that one I was an adult. I felt like I was putting myself out there naked . . . and that they didn’t like my body at all.�

Kurys turned down a chance to direct the version of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses� that was eventually directed by Stephen Frears because “as a French classic, it intimidated me.� She also walked away from a picture about photographer Diane Arbus after being bypassed as screenwriter in favor of biographer Patricia Bosworth. Anyhow, working in Hollywood has never been a goal of hers.

“In France, the writer-director has the power,� Kurys says. “In Hollywood, it’s the money people. You start feeling useless, like just another Kleenex in the box. That’s a bad feeling for an artist, who relies on ego, to have. Hollywood is becoming less of an art and more of an industry. If Picasso were working for them, they’d tell him to put more blue in his pictures because the Blue Period sold well. They’d tell him that with no shame. It’s common-denominator, million-dollar ideas, not personal vision.�

Her next vision?

“I have no plans,� she says with a shrug. “I can’t have two pans in the oven at the same time. And perhaps I’m a little bit lazy. I don’t sleep all day, but I need to travel and live. I’m not a workaholic like Woody Allen . . . and I feel a sense of guilt about that. I think if I’m that much of an artist, I should be at my desk every morning at 7. That’s what a real artist is all about.�