Anne-Marie Miéville's study of three generations of women explores the "fragile house of mirrors" in which the soul of modern woman exists. Odile (Hélène Roussel), her daughter Agnès (Anny Romand), and granddaughter Angèle (Gaël le Roi) all live in a most profound solitude by which love is defined. The film focuses on Angèle and Agnès' relationships with insensitive men whom they nevertheless determine to love. The struggle to delineate oneself as subject (vs. object) in relation to men not only carries over into the mother-daughter relationship, but, Miéville seems to be saying, may grow out of that relationship. "Always the daughter of..." Odile muses as she visits her aged father. Within surroundings of sumptuous natural beauty, Miéville has created a kind of no-woman's-land for her characters: they are poised in the space between distant telephones. Given love's impossibility, it would seem that only a miracle can keep the chain of life-something this film is so much concerned with-going. Miéville provides the miracle by bracketing the story with the death of Odile's father and the birth of Angèle's son, a kind of reincarnation for which there can be no explanation. Miéville has been a collaborator on Jean-Luc Godard's films and videos since the early seventies; in this, her first solo feature, we are struck not so much by Godard's influence on Miéville, but by her influence on Godard. The struggle against the impossible epitomized by Hail Mary has its roots in women like Odile, Agnès and Angèle.