The Midwife’s Tale

There’s a special feeling to watching an obscure WLW movie only available on a VHS rip. It makes me feel like an archaeologist, digging deep to find something ancient, blowing off the dust of ages so I can decipher this ancient text. The Midwife’s Tale came out in 1995. And I found it by just searching the title on YouTube. Still, for once the low quality sort of added to the experience for me. The Midwife’s Tale is about sapphic women in a medieval time period. You can’t expect that shit to be in 4K!

The framing of The Midwife’s Tale is that of a lesbian mother and OBGYN telling her young daughter a story about a “knightess” and a witch. The knightess is in fact, a noble woman named Lady Eleanor who enjoys horse riding and having more opinions than women at the time are supposed to. Eleanor’s mother died in childbirth and Eleanor believes the same fate will befall her. So, she searches out her mother’s midwife only to learn that she’s been imprisoned for witchcraft. The midwife’s apprentice, Gwenyth assists Eleanor with her problems, but pleads that Eleanor convince her powerful husband to release the midwife as she is not a witch, just a provider of reproductive health. But this is a difficult ask as women didn’t really have rights back then.

The Mifwife’s Tale is definitely constrained by budget and its short runtime. According to IMDB, the film is 75 minutes long. The version I found was 65 minutes. Either way, that means that while the plot moves along briskly. It’s a bit of an overview of events that could warrant more depth. This is a unique setting and story within the WLW movie canon. And while there’s been lots of other feminist writing dealing with the role of women and perceived “witches” in medieval times, few of those stories get a cinematic adaption. In a just world, a story with as much rich potential as The Midwife’s Tale would have resources to tell this story at a higher level. But that’s not the world we live in.

And despite living in this unjust reality where this sort of WLW movie had paltry funding and a minuscule release, I think it’s a pretty strong work. The film is extremely passionate and very specifically focused. The themes it wants to get across all come through, despite the minimum runtime. It’s a really focused project both in terms of story and the visual realization. This seems to be a passion project for writer/director Megan Siler. And Siler really did the damn thing. This is a narrative she wanted to see that didn’t exist. So she made it herself. That’s incredibly admirable. And the fact that she did it to a solid level of competence and focus is even better.

It does make me laugh that the very premise of this movie would be so upsetting to bigots both in 1995 and today. A working, lesbian mom tells her young daughter a story that not just involves but celebrates both lesbianism and abortion. But what this very premise also does is shine a light on how much “indoctrination” is already in the stories we tell young children. It’s just that usually, the lessons kids are supposed to take are ones that skew heteronormative and often, deny a level of agency to women.

The Midwife’s Tale isn’t technically a fairy tale because it lacks a fantasy element. But because it’s a tale about medieval shit with a happily ever after, it might as well be. Especially for queer people when seeing this sort of happy ending is something of a fantasy in and of itself. The film is slightly hurt by its lack of budget and the poor quality of the copy I watched. But even with these drawbacks, I enjoyed the film. It’s something new in WLW movie canon, a bedtime story. And it’s not just new, but well executed and not-so-subtly radical in its themes of queerness, feminism and reproductive health in medieval and modern times.

Overall rating: 6.3/10

Other WLW films in similar genres