The Midwife

In Martin Provost’s 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. The rootless amoral wastrel Beatrice breathes new energy, spirit and joie de vivre into the abstemious midwife, pulling her out of her womb of natal duty. 

Beatrice is aided by Paule, the long-distance trucker whose garden abuts Claire’s. When he leads her to a spectacular high panoramic view he repeats the midwife’s instructions at birth: “Breathe. Take a deep breath.” Paule confirms Beatrice’s urge to accumulate as much pleasure as she can as she succumbs to the cancer in her brain.

Another rebirth occurs at the professional level. The clinic is closing for want of funds.  Claire’s colleagues are happily joining an ultra-modern, high-tech and profitable new super-clinic. Claire’s early reluctance to join them is confirmed when her visit discovers that the new tech will make her experience and values obsolescent. 

She rejects that rebirth — a conversion to the technical — and instead renews her faith in the human values of her profession. She will teach her old ways rather than abandon herself to the new. That reaffirmation of herself is itself a rebirth, if rather a renewal than a conversion.

Claire’s son Simon parallels her movement. Not faring well in his plan to become a surgeon, he decides to become a midwife himself. Or as the new world has it: birth technician. This as his own fiancee is pregnant.  

Dramatically, Claire’s last delivery in the old institute is an emergency operation on a young woman whom she delivered 28 years ago — whose life she saved by providing her own blood. “Lucky we had the same rhesus,” she adds modestly, feeling she was only doing her job.

Beatrice hardly seems a likely agent for Claire’s salvation. Beatrice was Claire’s father’s mistress. They spent enjoyable time together until Beatrice’s abrupt departure drove the father to kill himself. Unaware of that event, Beatrice returns hoping to see him one last time before she dies, to make amends. Deprived of that opportunity, she manages to break down Claire’s understandable antagonism and work out a kind of salvation for both.

The drama runs two parallel plot lines: Beatrice’s death and Claire’s renewed interest in life and the pursuit of pleasure. As both heroines leave their respective pasts the last shot seems their metaphoric standin: Paule notes that the old rowboat that was collecting water is now sinking completely away. The water closes serenely over its ruin, closing over it like a lost memory.