In her first feature film, Miéville brings together three generations of women-a daughter, mother, and grandmother-whose stories evolve, intertwine, and echo each other, like a complex piece of music. As in her later work, Miéville is concerned with the difficult relationships between women and men, and the complexity of communication. In a series of charged scenes, a mother interrupts her daughter, a young woman sings to her troubled lover, a daughter confides in her preoccupied mother. The men in their lives, with their insistent demands, persistently "subject" the women. The women find that "you have to speak louder if you want your voice to be heard and take your place in the order of things. This consciousness of having to pay a price in order to really be a subject is terrible but natural" (Frédéric Strauss). They literally pursue a voice-one sings opera, another earns her living translating. For Miéville words and music are the means to create one's place in life; she returns to this idea throughout her oeuvre.