The shared parenting aspect of this film is only at the very end. A good and loving father figure, whose toddler is trying to pull him back, tells her to go to her mother, and walks out in evident  distress. Maybe the child ahd he would have been successful in keeping a joint life....but the mother wanted the man out of her life and held all the cards.

The core of the film is alternating scenes of the start of a love affair, and its wretched end. It is subtle, sensitive and nuanced. There is enough in it for personal interpretations to vary widely, and for more than one viewing to reveal more depths. None of the points I found in it are more than hinted at. A thought provoking film about  relationship failure.

The couple (American, with significant cultural differences from anyone in the Uk) fell in love. He readily, her more slowly. Theywere mismatched. But n an ideal world probably not irretrievably so. Both were the outcomes of unhappy parenting. She of a loveless iparental marriage which had turned her father into a hostile ranter, he of maternal abandonment. She had turned to sexual and emotional promiscuity, but with a determination to become a doctor. He had turned to short term hedonism - but of a benign sort. He had a dead-end manual job, but took great pleasure in the occasional opportunities to show human kindness. She became pregnant by another man and could not go through an abortion. She never made it to a doctor, but was very committed to work and never overcame her resentment.

He rescued her, and they set up an initially happy home. 

She became embittered at the limitations  of her life, and with  her husband. He tried as best as he could to make everyone happy, though sometimes in a crude and crass way. She was too resentful to care or even notice. She siezed on the failures not the intentions.  He became petulant and irrational. In a delicately contra-stereotype move, he was in touch with his feelings and could express them, including his anger and frustration. But often in a way and in situations which made things worse. All she could do was pick on his faults and say 'I cannot stand living like this'.

And so it gets worse and worse. One feels very sad for the little girl whose father (though not his biological one) had provided so much love and fun was almost certainly going to be excluded. Her mother is also a sympathetic figure who provided material care and much love for the girl, but less at her level.

A very suitable case for 'marital therapy' though the gaps had become appalling. If not, a case for shared parenting. Though wretchedly one know what would happen in the UK. She would say that such was her hostility to her ex-husband that contact would distress her, and she could wheel out the worst of his behaviour. And if he did not back off of his own accord, the courts would say that the mother's feelings justified the girl being denied contact.