Film

A Common Thread (2004)

Director: Éléonore Faucher

Movie review

From Time Out London

Imperilled or alienated youth has proven a fecund theme in recent European cinema. Director-co-writer Eléonore Faucher eschews the strict minimalism of the Dardenne brothers’ spiritual enquiries or Lynne Ramsey’s visual expressionism in favour of a minor-chord lyrical naturalism for her sensitive debut, the story of an isolated, pregnant 17-year-old in rural Charente. Hiding her bloating tummy from sarcastic supermarket colleagues, aspiring embroideress Claire (the flame-haired Lola Naymark) takes a job in the house of a grieving haute couture designer (Guédiguian regular and wife Ariane Ascaride) and over the needlework a bond slowly forms. Impressive visuals (courtesy of Pierre Cottereau), sound design and effective if modernistically withholding performances combine with Faucher’s mood-sensitive attention to gesture and detail to a kind of therapeutic effect, conjuring an intriguing, non-specific feminised space. Sweet, too, to see how Faucher privileges the (creative) work of hands; a lovingly slow pan over a particularly beautiful sequined design becomes her low-key equivalent of the epiphanic bell-making scene in Tarkovsky’s ‘Andrei Rublev’.

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