My Life Without Me
Ann (Sarah Polley) is a hard-working 23-year-old mother with two small daughters, an unemployed husband (Scott Speedman), a mother (Deborah Harry) who sees her life as a failure, and a jailed father whom she has not seen for ten years. Her life changes dramatically when, during a medical checkup following a collapse, she is diagnosed with metastatic ovarian cancer and told that she has only two months to live.
Deciding not to tell anyone of her condition and using the cover of anemia, Ann makes a list of things to do before she dies. She decides to change her hair, record birthday messages for the girls for every year until they're 18, and tries to set up her husband with another woman.
Feeling a longing to experience a life that was never available to her, she seeks out a man to experience how it feels to be in a sexual relationship with someone other than her husband. Her experiment ends up taking an emotional toll when she meets with a man named Lee, who ends up madly in love with her and is left heartbroken when Ann breaks up. He meets with her one last time and says that he will do anything to make her happy, taking care of her daughters and even finding her husband a new job. She ends their relationship and never tells him that she is dying.
At the end of the film, Ann records a message to her husband, telling him that she loves him, and another one to Lee, telling him the same. She then leaves all tapes that she has recorded with her doctor, asking him to deliver them after her death.
thought-provoking, romantic, sentimental, storytelling, flashback