A Clever Woman—a thoughtful film about love, loss and family relationships

Dot and Pheobe in A Clever Woman

A Clever Woman, directed by Jon Sanders, is a quiet but impactful film about loss and memory. Sisters Dot and Phoebe return to organise their childhood home after the death of their mother a year before.

To remember their mother they plan to exhibit a performance art piece, taking the audience around the home, telling stories of their lives. The poetry of Mary Coleridge, to which the sisters’ mother would write music to, features several times in the film. Her poem A Clever Woman gives the film its name.

The planned art piece pushes the sisters to delve further into the memories of their mother and their lives in the house.

While never seen, Dot and Phoebe’s mother is the character the audience learns most about. As the two daughters reminisce, we discover their mother was a composer.

She would often cry in the garden and had many affairs. Through conversation, the pair unwrap all their complicated feelings about their mother and sometimes discover that they have remembered the past in different ways.

The only other main characters in the film are Tom, who has been looking after the house, and Monica, a friend of the sisters who has come to help out. While there are no big twists in the plot, the tension in the house begins to build after Tom and Monica strike up an unexpected connection.

But really this plot point only acts as a vehicle for the most compelling part of A Clever Woman—the relationship between Dot, played by Josie Lawrence, and Phoebe, played by Tanya Myers.

The intricacies of relationships between sisters are often challenging to capture. But A Clever Woman manages to capture the love but also the tension between the two main characters.

The performances of every actor in this film are all good. But in the scenes between Lawrence and Myers, it’s easy to forget that they are acting at all—they are completely convincing as sisters. A Clever Woman’s first scene might fool the audience into thinking it’s a documentary film.

Towards the end of the film, the sisters talk about how there must be thousands of people doing what they are doing—clearing a house after the death of a loved one. And it’s the familiarity of this story that makes this film compelling and draws you in.

• A Clever Woman is in cinemas from 21 April