Three years ago, French film-maker Martin Provost made the intimate and intelligent Violette, with Sandrine Kiberlain and Emmanuelle Devos, recreating a little-known literary friendship between Simone de Beauvoir and her difficult protege Violette Leduc. Now Provost has given us another face-off between an older and a younger woman: fictional this time. It’s quite as robustly directed and well acted as Violette, if a little contrived and heading inevitably to a sentimental acceptance of life’s painful tangles.

The emotional duellists this time are Catherine Frot and Catherine Deneuve; Frot plays Claire Breton, a hospital midwife, and Deneuve is Béatrice, the glamorous but disreputable mistress of Claire’s late father, a woman who caused heartbreak and tragedy. Now this ageing homewrecker suddenly reappears, with money and health worries, brazenly asking for Claire’s help. Claire is furious at the opening of old wounds, and yet their angry reunion raises the extraordinary possibility that this undoubtedly vibrant and interesting woman could be a kind of mother figure to Claire in her own lonely middle age.

It is a very good idea for a two-hander, and Frot and Deneuve give it their considerable all, though Deneuve does look a little stately in her “gambling den” moments. Frot, on the other hand, has some genuinely moving childbirth scenes, especially when she realises she delivered the young mother of a newborn, 28 years before. However preposterous, it is carried off with a certain style.