Brodeuses (A Common Thread)

Raised on a farm near the industrial town of Angoulême, 200 miles southwest of Paris, Claire works as a cashier at a huge supermarket but lives for the spare hours she can devote to embroidering her original designs on fine fabrics and rabbit pelts. A curvy redhead of 16 or 17, Claire lives alone in a small studio and has thus far concealed her unwanted pregnancy from co-workers and family. She shares her condition in detailed letters to her best friend who lives in Lyon. Through a chain of circumstances, Claire is taken on as an assistant by Madame Melikian, a master embroiderer who sews delicate ornamentation for the top fashion houses. Stern but fair, Madame Melikian is still in mourning for her twentysomething son who was killed in a motorcycle accident and who performed the work Claire is now doing. Ever so gradually, the mother-to-be, who doesn't want a baby, and the bereaved mother, who is ambivalent about continuing to live without her beloved son, forge a relationship built on unspoken understanding and mutual respect for their craft.