ANAny discussion of Pieces of a Woman, a Netflix drama by Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó about a couple suffering from their daughter’s sudden death during childbirth, almost inevitably depends on The Scene. This scene is a single 24-minute shot covering the entire home birth; a single oscillating camera accompanies the Boston couple Sean (Shia Labeouf) and Martha (Vanessa Kirby) from the first dizzying contractions to agonizing labor on the floor, in the bathtub, in the bed, to the last-minute replacement midwife Eva (Molly Parker) understanding the baby’s slow heartbeat to the couple’s initial joy while holding their daughter and, finally, their horror when her crying subsided. Skillfully choreographed and relentlessly focused, anchored by the absolute physical commitment of its protagonists, the scene demands penance from the viewer. I started spread out on my bed and crouched out.
The scene has also become, through the press and well-deserved praise for Kirby’s performance, the movie’s calling card, both for Netflix viewers and for award contests. No serious discussion for the race for best actress at this point omits Kirby’s name. (Now is as good a time as any to mention that LaBeouf’s intensity on the scene, and her violent and hard-hitting portrait of mourning throughout the film, fall more sickeningly, given the abuse allegations made by his ex-girlfriend , singer FKA Twigs, in the New York Times last month; Netflix has since removed its name from its packages For Your Consideration) The scene makes up the first quarter of the film – the rest unfolds, in episodes outlined by date , over the next eight months, as Sean and Martha’s marriage falls apart and his mother Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn) leads a nebulous criminal negligence trial against Eva. But it is undeniably the center of gravity of the film and its selling point, sharp and meticulous where the rest of the film is hazy, underwritten and uncovered.
From its title, Pieces of a Woman intends to explore the fragments of a person, or a marriage, destroyed by an unimaginable loss. But, frustratingly (and without prejudice to Kirby’s performance), Martha’s trauma is the piece that receives the most attention. The film involuntarily ends up falling into a common trap of cinema and TV seriously interested in female trauma: defining a woman by the worst thing that ever happened to her, highlighting the traumatic event in absorbing and eye-popping details, leaving all the pieces out of sight, out of sight.
Pieces of a Woman shares her intention to trace the long, spiraling shadow of under-represented (or at least under-represented in nuance) female trauma with the promising young woman, writer / director Emerald Fennell, ambitious comedy from black humor of the revenge of the # MeToo era. Although disparate in tone – It represents a cool breeze in the dead of winter, Promising Young Woman the crack of gum – the two films portray a woman suffering from irreparable trauma and star an English actor whose acting at the top of her career brings much more depth than the writing. (Both were also launched on the festival circuit in 2020 and made available, respectively, on VOD and Netflix, last month). Both films orbit around the breathtaking concept of an opening scene (for Promising Young Woman, a woman who attracts predators by pretending to be drunk) who, ultimately, reveals the difficulty of shooting a film about trauma when responses to that trauma – processing, setbacks, idiosyncrasies, reach – do not receive nearly as much attention or care as the trauma hook itself.
This is partly the case in a promising young woman, who coats a melted core of anger and sadness resulting from a sexual assault on Cassie’s best childhood friend (Carey Mulligan) in a hard shell of revenge. In Pieces, Kirby’s Martha is a withdrawn and intensely physical presence, retreating from the physical touch and engaging in conversation with a tense and contained sadness. But the film, written by Mundruczó’s wife, Kata Wéber, barely gives him space or time to speak. The last half of the film snakes into Sean’s escapism through drugs and a case with a cousin prosecutor Suzanne (Sarah Snook) overseeing his criminal case, with the judicial process itself poorly crafted and rushed. Where the delivery scene portrays Martha’s tragedy in clinical and radical detail, Martha herself remains, leaving Kirby’s evocative performance irritatingly opaque.
No film will perfectly capture such a personal and insulating trauma, and there is a genuine revelation in seeing pain often trivialized or sanitized in detail on the screen. (As exemplified by the retreat and strong response to Chrissy Teigen’s Instagram post of her agonized face moments after she lost a baby last year, or in Meghan Markle’s New York Times about her postabortion sadness, the pain of losing a child, one who barely had time to know, remains stigmatized and often not verbalized).
But such revelations should not prevent you from dealing with the consequences of throat-grabbing representations. The 24-minute delivery scene was, in fact, unlike anything I’ve ever seen; I just wanted you to treat Martha with the same subtlety as the trauma that was meant to define you, to find the dark path beyond the trauma as interesting as the incendiary event itself, and to want your audience to care as much about the woman at your center as it does about it. evidence of his most shocking piece.