There are two Catherines in this film, the ever-beautiful Catherine Deneuve and charming Catherine Frot. They are equal in stature, performance and grace. This is a beautiful film with so many nuances and attention to tiny detail: the contrasts of fragility and strength of relationships portrayed through the marrying of opposing forces. Beatrice (Deneuve) and Claire (Frot) are perfectly balanced. The male presences of Claire's son and boyfriend are almost superfluous but without them, the gradual understanding developing between Beatrice and Claire would be too intense, too insular. Claire's profession as midwife is beautifully portrayed through real-life births which bring out her innate empathy and humanity. The metaphor of the closing maternity clinic where she works and the new, technically advanced hospital where focus is on the number of births achieved rather than the intimate personal deliveries, where the senior 'midwife' is now male - a birth technician - is reflected in Claire's life where the past, never far away from her mind, is relived through Beatrice's coming back into her life, and which comes to mean so much more to her than her present or future.
There are subsidiary themes about women's independence, appropriation of female roles by men, the diminution of women's private and intimate worlds in today's society. While these are interesting, they do not detract from the central theme of the film: women's relationships and how, despite all challenges, women will understand another woman in a way that she will never understand the opposite sex.
Another complex and riveting example of French filmmaking.
There are subsidiary themes about women's independence, appropriation of female roles by men, the diminution of women's private and intimate worlds in today's society. While these are interesting, they do not detract from the central theme of the film: women's relationships and how, despite all challenges, women will understand another woman in a way that she will never understand the opposite sex.
Another complex and riveting example of French filmmaking.