A Common Thread

A slowly captivating drama which brings together elements of the new minimalist, rural and feminist schools in its portrait of a pregnant young country girl from the Alps-Maritime. Faucher builds her film around the freckled, pre-Raphaelite-haired Lola Naymark who responds with an engaging, if modernistically withholding performance. ‘Thank God, for Embroidery’, she writes to her friend: this is her lifeline which leads her to work for suicidal Armenian Madam Melikian (Ascaride), with whom she begins to bond (in a way impossible with her own mother) and reconsider the fate of her unborn child. Faucher is keen to show the effects on lives of beauty – expressed in colour-filtered landscape compositions or tracks over an intricate sequined shawl – as she is the determinations of environment and body politics. Despite some mis-timed editing, a sympathetic and pleasing debut.