AAny review of Pieces of a Woman, a Netflix drama by Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó about a couple reeling from their daughter’s sudden death in childbirth, almost inevitably depends on The Scene. This scene is a single take of 24 minutes that covers the entire home birth; a swinging single camera follows Boston’s couple Sean (Shia Labeouf) and Martha (Vanessa Kirby) from dizzying early contractions to painful contractions on the floor, in the bath, on the bed, through last-minute replacement midwife Eva’s (Molly Parker ) realization of the baby’s heartbeat to the couple’s initial joy as they hold their little daughter and, finally, their horror fades away like her cries. Skilfully choreographed and relentlessly focused, anchored by the leads’ absolute physical dedication, the scene demands penance from the viewer. I started it spread on my bed and left huddled.
The scene has also become, by the press and deserved praise for Kirby’s achievement, the movie’s calling card, both for Netflix viewers and for contests. Not a single serious discussion of the best actress race at the moment leaves out Kirby’s name. (Now is a good time to mention that LaBeouf’s intensity in the scene, and his brutal, powerful portrayal of grief throughout the film, lands more troubled given the allegations of abuse by his former girlfriend, the singer FKA Twigs, in The New York Times. last month; Netflix has since removed its name from their For Your Consideration packages). The scene forms the first quarter of the movie – the rest takes place, in episodes delineated by date, over the next eight months, as Sean and Martha’s marriage falls apart and her mother Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn) leads the way in a hazy criminal negligence proceeding against Eva. But it’s undeniably the center of gravity and selling point of the movie, sharp and meticulous where the rest of the movie is foggy, underwritten, and exaggerated.
From the title, Pieces of a Woman claims to explore the shards of a person or of a marriage, shattered by an unimaginable loss. But frustratingly (and without detracting from Kirby’s performance), Martha’s trauma is the piece that gets the lion’s share of the attention. The film inadvertently falls into a common trap of film and TV seriously interested in female trauma: defining a woman by the worst that has ever happened to her, illuminating the traumatic event in dazzling, absorbing detail while leaving out all the pieces. dark, out of sight.
Pieces of a Woman shares an intention to trace the long, spiral shadow of underrepresented (or at least underrepresented in terms of nuance) female trauma with the eponymous Promising Young Woman, writer / director Emerald Fennell’s sharp, ambitious dark comedy from #Revenge from the MeToo era. While the tone is diverse – pieces of a cold breeze in the dead of winter, Promising Young Woman the snap of bubblegum – both films show a woman reeling from irreparable trauma, and play an English actor whose career- top performance brings much more depth than written. (Both were also released on the festival circuit in 2020 and made available on VOD and Netflix respectively in the past month). Both films revolve around the arresting concept of an early scene (for Promising Young Woman, a woman who lures predators by pretending to be blacked out drunk) that ultimately reveal the difficulty of a film about trauma when the reactions to that trauma – the processing, the relapses, the quirks, the reach – don’t get nearly as much attention or care as the trauma hook itself.
That’s partly the case in Promising Young Woman, which wraps a molten core of anger and grief resulting from an assault on Cassie’s (Carey Mulligan) childhood best friend into a hard shell of revenge. In Pieces, Kirby’s Martha is a withdrawn, intensely physical presence, recoiling from physical touch and a long conversation with tense, distant grief. But the film, written by Mundruczó’s wife, Kata Wéber, offers her little space or time to speak. The second half of the film winds through drugs and an affair with a cousin of district attorney Suzanne (Sarah Snook) who oversees their criminal case, with the thinly drawn and hasty trial itself, and with Elizabeth’s toxic conviction over. Martha’s grief as hers to sue. . Where the labor scene depicts Martha’s tragedy in clinical, sweeping detail, Martha herself, Kirby’s evocative performance aside, remains maddeningly opaque.
No film will perfectly capture such a personal, isolating trauma, and seeing pain that is often downplayed or purified in detail on screen is a real revelation. (As exemplified by both the backlash and strong reaction to Chrissy Teigen’s Instagram post of her tormented face moments after she lost a baby last year, or Meghan Markle’s New York Times op-ed about her grief after a miscarriage, the pain of losing of a child (one hardly had time to know that remains stigmatized and often unspoken).
But such revelations should not prevent dealing with the consequences of throat-grabbing images. The 24-minute labor scene was indeed unlike anything I’ve ever seen; I wish it treated Martha with the same finesse as the trauma to describe her, found the shadow path beyond trauma as interesting as the incendiary event itself, and wanted the audience to care about the woman at the center as much as the evidence of her most shocking piece.