The Midwife

The title could be plural. While Claire is the actual midwife, having delivered a generation of newborns into the world, her antithetical Beatrice also serves as a kind of midwife when she brings Claire into new life.

There are two Catherines in this film, the ever-beautiful Catherine Deneuve and charming Catherine Frot. They are equal in stature, performance and grace.

I gave this 30 minutes to get going, but there were no signs of anything of interest developing and so early termination seemed both appropriate and ethical.Perhaps it picks up pace later on, but I just didn't care what happened to either of the two principal characters.

A beautiful story, beautifully told and filmed. Great acting from the two Catherine's and also from Olivier Gourmet as Paul.

Frot and Deneuve are magical together. The acting is sublime.

The premise of this story is preposterous: long ago, midwife Claire's father had a mistress named Beatrice (Deneuve), and he killed himself when she left him. After many years, Beatrice gets in touch with Claire (Frot), who is obviously none too pleased.

Midwife = Wise woman in translation. This movie is about two wise women.

Unlike many Hollywood films, I find that foreign films render the complexity of characters and relationships more akin to real life, and so it is in "The Midwife." The film also excels in giving us a context for the fraught relationship of the two women leads, Claire and Beatrice, but not with easy flashbacks or an improbable verbal summary; instead, their history unfolds the way it would in real life--in bits of dialogue that not only bring up the past but show us how, although buried by Claire and superficially dismissed by Beatrice, it has lingered sufficiently to scar them and to force them to come to new terms in addressing their present situation.

One of the many ways that European and Hollywood films differ is that the former is willing to dwell on the ordinary while the latter usually prefers to make stories bigger than they merit. The French film The Midwife (2017) is an example of storytelling that works simply by putting two very different women together and watching how they resolve the webs of emotion that have become tangled over time.