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Brodeuses (A Common Thread) (12A)

• Consumer Advice: Contains moderate sex
• Run time: 1 hour 28 mins

• Language: French
• Genre: Drama
• Release date: 20th May 2005

• Starring: Lola Naymark, Ariane Ascaride, Jackie Berroyer
• Directed by: Eleonore Faucher

• Distributor: Soda Pictures

Plot Synopsis

At the age of seventeen, still in high school and working at the supermarket, Claire (Lola Naymark) learns she is pregnant. She keeps the news from her family and tells her friends her weight gain is a side effect of treatments for cancer. Eventually, Claire has to hide out altogether, so she takes a rented room and gets a job as an apprentice to Madame Melikian (Ariane Ascaride), a strange and lonely woman who has recently lost her young son in a motorcycle accident. The reclusive foreigner's business is embroidery for the haute couturiers of Paris. The older woman is still in the throes of grief over the death of her child, while the younger is anxious and confused about the child yet to be born.

Richly ornamented and luxurious, the shawls and hangings that Madame Melikian and Claire produce become visual signifiers for the relationship that gradually materializes between the two women. The depth of the metaphor lies not only in the threads that connect them, but also in the teaching of elaborate and precious skills, the sharing of aesthetics and understanding, the simultaneous delicacy and strength of unspoken communication and the possibility of creating something beautiful out of adversity.

Pierre Cottereau's cinematography captures the fragility of the blossoming relationship in rich warm tones and the soundtrack - a combination of lyrical music, sparse dialogue and the barely audible clicks of needles and glides of thread through gossamer fabric - conjures the dreamlike space apart that the women create through their work. Modest in conception and theme, but remarkable in the confidence and maturity of its execution, Faucher's assured first feature brings extraordinary pleasure.