ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies.

WARMHEARTED and meticulously observed, A Common Thread announces a promising new talent in French writer-director Eleonore Faucher.

The story of a rural teenager coming to terms with her pregnancy is simple and straightforward, but Faucher invests it with a wealthy of feeling. Sentimentality is kept at bay, the performances are luminous and the end result has a refreshing optimism about life, overcoming adversity and the ties that bind us together.

Lola Naymark is Claire, a naive teenager who finds herself pregnant and cannot decide whether she wants to keep the child. A stoical survivor, she has a talent for embroidery that seems likely to languish unappreciated.

When local embroiderer Madam Melikian (Ariane Ascaride) loses her son in a motorbike accident, Claire approaches her for a job. The core of the film becomes the bond that develops between a woman whose child has died and a girl anxious about a child that has yet to be born.

Beautifully photographed by Pierre Cottereau, A Common Thread finds a delicate visual metaphor for the relationship between the women in the embroidery commissions that they make together. Increasingly elaborate and detailed, they come to signify they common ground that they find as the film develops into a celebration of the maternal instinct.
  
Newcomer Naymark and French veteran Ascaride both get under the skin of their characters and although the film is little too neat and tidy in its plotting this is still a hugely assured and engaging first feature.
  
A COMMON THREAD (Brodeuses)
National release, selected cinemas
Director: Eleonore Faucher
Stars: Lola Naymark, Ariane Ascaride, Marie Felix, Thomas Laroppe, Arthur
Quehen
Screenwriter: Eleonore Faucher, Gaelle Mace
Certificate: 12A
Running time: 87 mins
Country: France
Year: 2004
 

© Allan Hunter, 2005