The Midwife
Written and directed by Martin Provost
Rated PG, 117 minutes
Limited release
The trouble with being a fully-fledged, magnificently appointed, ocean-going star is that it becomes harder and harder to find roles that befit one's status.
As he or she ages, the inclination to submit to some wet-behind-the-ears director with woolly hair and woollier ideas disappears, until the star sits alone on the hill, adored and out of work.
It would be fair to say that Catherine Deneuve does not know of that which I speak. Very few actors reach her stratospheric level and few continue to work as hard as she does - at the age of 74 (as of last Sunday).
In the '90s she made perhaps one big film a year - things like Indochine - but she picked up the pace around 1998. In 1999, she did five films, and since then she has been averaging two or three per year, with some of the finest directors in France - Andre Techine, Arnaud Desplechin, Francois Ozon, Benoit Jacquot.
She has always supported female directors and the occasional first-timer. Her magnificence brings money, allowing difficult projects to get made.
Working so hard doesn't always achieve the highest quality of performance though, so when one comes along that does, we may rejoice and give thanks.
The Midwife does that, not just for her but for co-star Catherine Frot, who's 13 years younger and far less of an institution.
That's really the hard part for Deneuve: she has to work harder to play an ordinary woman - someone the public will accept as real.
In fact, writer/director Martin Provost gives her someone who's outsize in personality, as well as in foibles.
That's one of the secrets to good characterisation - the writer has to love the faults, maybe even more than the qualities.
Claire Breton (Frot) is an experienced midwife in a unit that is closing down, somewhere outside Paris.
Two babies are born in the first scene and it looks like the real thing, which is a quick way to bring us closer to raw emotion. Claire does not wish to sign the new deal that would transfer her to a soulless high-tech big hospital.
We see how closely her unit works together, a birthing team of dedication and deep experience. That's a contrast with the rest of her life: high in a housing block, alone except for rare visits from her son. Claire's major activity apart from work is an allotment, where she grows vegetables.
Her life changes with the unwelcome return of Beatrice Sobolevski (Deneuve), who was once her stepmother. Beatrice left when Claire was about 14 - and Claire's enmity has only grown since. The woman was bad news: a professional gambler who sent her father to his early grave. No way she is going to waltz back into my life, even if she does have cancer, thinks Claire.
That word often condemns a film to sentimentality, but Provost works around that. He's interested in how a woman with foreshortened expectations and a battered heart might react to a woman who has plenty of regrets but a huge gusto for life and limited time.
Beatrice refuses to back off or be baited about the past. I may have been bad for your father but he was the love of my life, she tells Claire, disarmingly. As if on cue, Paul the truck driver (Olivier Gourmet), who tends the next allotment, takes an interest in Claire.
Apart from the superbly controlled performances, apart from the quiet humour, apart from the lovely sense of wisdom that underlies the writing, what I loved about this film was the way Provost draws his characters into moments of transcendence.
These usually happen without dialogue or dramatic nudging. Paul takes both women for a ride in his truck and their sense of joy is palpable.
Claire lies beside the ailing Beatrice in her bed to comfort her, then pulls the covers over them both. Provost creates a moving, grown-up story from these small moments. What more could we ask for?
