Barking and Dagenham Post, UK
May 20 2005

Young director has drama all sewn up

20 May 2005
A COMMON THREAD
(Les Brodeuses)
Director: éléonore Faucher
Starring: Lola Naymark, Ariane Ascaride
French with English
sub-titles
89 mins, 12A
***

An unmarried country girl becomes pregnant with an unwanted child.
Not a novel dish – but one beautifully treated in a sensitive film
distinguished by fine acting and admirable photography.

This is the first feature of the young French director, éléonore
Faucher, and it is a good one. A miniature, though perhaps not
Tolstoy, it would hold its own with Mrs Gaskell.

At first its tone is rough, unpleasant. Claire (exceptionally
well-played by Lola Naymark), is the red-haired farmer’s daughter
from a village in deepest France who becomes pregnant. The father
does not want to know. She takes a job in a supermarket.

Everyone is objectionable. Her parents are objectionable to each
other, her mother is objectionable to her, she is objectionable to
her younger brother.

Claire is examined by a doctor and angrily declares that she wants to
bear the child anonymously and then give it away. She leaves the
supermarket and seeks work with Mme Mélikian, an Armenian lady (again
exceptionally well played by Ariane Ascaride), who embroiders for the
haute couture designer Christian Lacroix.

Mme Mélikian is depressed because her son has died – and very
suspicious. But eventually she agrees to Claire’s coming to embroider
in her workshop.

The heart and strength of the film is the development of the
initially difficult relationship between Claire and the much older
woman.

Claire is kind to Mme Mélikian and eventually accepts an invitation
to move in. Her anger disappears and, through their contentment with
each other, she, in effect, achieves a state of grace.

It is a very practical film. You can learn how to harvest cabbages,
embroider with an old sewing machine, conduct an obstetric
examination, open up a portable radio, take a hook out of a fish’s
mouth, make dolmades, and get laid when six-months’ pregnant.

But the best thing of all is the acting of the two leading ladies,
totally different in style.

Naymark is young, open, pro-active, and her attractive face is
continuously responsive to change.

Ascaride’s face is of a damaged soul, sometimes hard, sometimes
without hope.

But when she smiles, you smile with her. Made-up for a visit to
Paris, she is impressive. For she has style – the sort of style which
one sometimes sees in Russian ballerinas of a certain age.

–Boundary_(ID_RpOnGuyFc8DcFSvCXVckGg)–

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress