Martha is a 78 year old woman living with cancer. She is cared for by a visiting nurse, Malinka. She regularly sees her son and her friends and also cares for her elderly neighbour Billy who lives next door.

A Woman’s Tale had been on my radar for years as it stars the inimitable Sheila Florence who played Lizzie Birdsworth in Prisoner Cell Block H. I knew that she played the role whilst she was also battling cancer in real life. I also knew that the film and her performance were very highly regarded.

The film is a beautiful rumination on impending death and mortality. Whilst this may sound like not the most uplifting viewing experience, Martha is just as eccentric as Lizzie and by all accounts Sheila Florence as a person. I loved the irreverant idiosyncracies she exhibits which instantly made me think of Lizzie- her saying that her earliest memory was of being in her highchair as an infant and eating what she thought was a current but was, in fact, a dead fly. ‘It was delicious!’ she quips. Or when she’s talking about her similarly elderly friend. She tells her nurse, ‘She’s 90 years old but has never been loved by a man. That’s not right!’

But there is also, predictably, a massive emotional pull to preceedings. The dinner scene in which she talks of the summer’s afternoon during the war when she describes the dogfight between English and German planes which crash into each other. She then describes how there was suddenly body parts raining down on all and sundry. Or when she describes the death of her 10 month old daughter when the city she was in was bombed and she found her dead baby after it’s lungs had exploded because of the force of the shelling. This is heartbreaking stuff as is the final scene.

Sheila Florence’s performance is extrodinary. The critics agreed with even Roger Ebert making A Woman’s Tale one of his Films of 1991 and giving special praise to Florence’s performance. He added the film to his list of the best films of all time in 2004.

Sheila won the Australian Film Institute award for Best Actress. 9 days later she passed away.

An profoundly beatuiful film which is just as brilliant as I thought it would be.

5 out of 5 stars