Time Out
October 20, 2004
Film: London Film Festival Listings – Saturday 23;
[parts omitted]
4.00 A Common Thread (Ilionore OWE1 Faucher, 2004, Fr) Lola Naymark,
Ariane Ascaride, Marie Filix. 88 mins. Subtitles.
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 fromthe 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 writesto 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. (WH) 4.00 Chisholm ’72 Unbought and NFT2 Unbossed See Fri 22
above 4.15 Warsaw NFT3 See Fri 22 above 4.15 Woman Is the Future of
Man ICA1 See Fri 22 above 6.00 Garden State (Zach Braff, 2003, OWE2
US) Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Ian Holm.