Another women-oriented movie from Rodrigo Garcia

Annette Bening gives a compelling performance in <i>Mother and Child</i>. Photo / Supplied

Annette Bening and Naomi Watts play estranged mother and daughter in another women-oriented movie from director Rodrigo Garcia.

He's the son of Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, yet Rodrigo Garcia couldn't write a novel to save himself. Rather he enjoys the visual medium, having started out in photography, then moved on to cinematography, and only directed his first movie, Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, in his 30s. Of course Garcia, now 50, writes his own screenplays and he definitely has a gift for that. His latest offering, Mother and Child, is a minor gem.

As with his previous women-oriented movies - he calls them cinematic murals - he weaves separate stories into his tale. The three characters here are the mother Karen (Annette Bening), her daughter Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), whom she adopted out as a baby and has never seen, and the infertile Lucy (Kerry Washington) who is going through the rigours of adopting the unborn child of a rather difficult young woman (Shareeka Epps).

"I wrote this story around the time my children were born," Garcia explains. "The recognition of that bond you have with your children made me think about what it must be like for people, for whatever set of circumstances, to be separated from their children. Karen was 14 when her mother held sway over her and made her adopt out her baby, and I wondered what it would be like to live for a decade obsessed with that missing person."

Bening's character, who pines for her lost child, is the focus of the film. "I would like to think the film is about opening up to life and accepting what you cannot control," Garcia says. "It wasn't up to Karen to find Elizabeth, yet the death of her mother and meeting Paco [Jimmy Smits] made her accept what life had in store."

Watts, who deftly inhabits her icily ambitious lawyer, came to the film via her friendship with her 21 Grams director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

"Alejandro was always a big fan of the screenplay and he introduced us," Garcia explains. "When Naomi became pregnant, we pushed the film back a few months. The movie was shot five weeks after her giving birth, but we actually did a shoot a few months earlier during her pregnancy. That's her actual baby you see, and the baby kicking, that's her baby." Watts is not usually a fan of disrobing in movies, though she deemed it essential here, in scenes where she is a kind of sexual predator.

"Certainly it's very intimate, the pregnant belly as much as the sexual nudity, yet Elizabeth's tools to control her environment are her beauty and her sexuality. She makes extremely dangerous choices to have an affair with her boss and to provoke the married man next door. But I think Naomi always understood that was who Elizabeth was."

So why does Garcia make films about women? Having grown up in what he calls "a functional family" with happily married parents and having a happy marriage of his own (to a schoolteacher), he admits that he simply likes women and writes better female characters.

"An idea never comes to me that involves killing a lion or invading Poland, those traditionally masculine pursuits. I'm always interested in a movie story where a person is trapped by their social, family or romantic ties.

"I don't think you have to be an expert to see that women are always tied to motherhood, to daughterhood and to keeping families together. Women are the glue and it's not easy to be glue."

LOWDOWN

* Who: Director Rodrigo Garcia

* What: Film Mother and Child starring Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, Samuel L. Jackson and Jimmy Smits

* When: Opens at cinemas Thursday

-TimeOut