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In just one 24-minute take, an elegant blonde named Martha (Vanessa Kirby) gives birth to a baby. She growls, crouches, sweats, curses, which makes this most feminine work intensely unfeminine. The hand-held camera goes back and forth, moving voyeuristically through the lobby that connects the rooms of a Boston townhouse. Her slate fingernails grip the edge of a claw-foot tub; his bearded partner, Sean (Shia LaBeouf), nervously strokes his face. Sigur Rós’ music swells in the background, then fades away as midwife Eva (Molly Parker) returns to urge Martha to push. From her room in the dim light, the woman moans, Icelandic post-rock drowned by cries of newborns soon followed by a strange silence.
Since its debut in September at the Venice Film Festival, Pieces of a woman was considered easy fodder at the Oscars for her daring, virtuoso tale of a home birth that ends in tragedy. Directed by Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó and written by his partner, Kata Wéber, Pieces of a woman is their first film in English and the first to be set in the United States. Known for his gritty subjects and dazzling visuals, Mundruczó has garnered international fame with White god (2014), a drama about an abandoned dog turned brutal fighter, which culminates in an epic scene of stray dogs storming the bridges and streets of Budapest. What appeared to be the effects of CGI were achieved with hundreds of breathing, barking, and wonderfully choreographed mixed breed dogs. In order not to be outdone by this past feat, the director has shifted his ambitions to Rooms a woman’s from the spectacular audience to the bewildering staff.
For some, the transition from dog fighting to childbirth might come as a surprise. This shouldn’t, of course; this one is just as primitive and often even thinner. That Mundruczó’s lens does not shy away from this fact is in itself worthy of admiration, especially given the dearth of films that honestly address the trauma of childbirth, let alone pregnancy loss. or the death of an infant. Browse “Lost Child Movies” and you’ll find rates on freak accidents on vacation, toddlers in traffic, and alluring murdered girls galore. The much more common experiences of miscarriage and stillbirth lack sensational – and paternalistic – attraction, and the extent to which they revolve around the uniquely female experience is probably another reason they are almost never the narrative center. of a serious prestige film.
Inspired in part by her own miscarriage, Weber originally wrote a hit play of the same name for the TR Warszawa Theater in Warsaw, Poland, its story compressed into two hard-hitting acts: Childbirth and Death of a girl in the first and a tumultuous dinner with Martha’s family in the second. As a seasoned theater actor, Kirby was a natural fit for the lead role of the screen adaptation and deserves any nomination he might come up with – as much for his exhilarating portrayal of worldly heartbreak as for his savage performance of to give birth. Back in the office to face her mealy-mouthed colleagues, hiding her leaky breasts from a little girl staring in a clothing store, using a public restroom in disposable maternity briefs mocking its very existence: the vagaries of life after the loss are a triathlon of suffering. Martha responds with a stubborn detachment that is as disturbing as it is plausible: “In 60 to 70% of these cases, we rarely find a satisfactory explanation,” the medical examiner told her. “I am really sorry.” Martha stands up with a “Thank you”.
From there, it looks like the film will play out as a grueling character and a study of Martha and Sean’s relationships in their opposing methods of grieving their daughter. As Sean swings in a chair, a silent Martha holds two bags of frozen vegetables to numb her breasts. “I miss her,” Sean sobs, his head in his hard hands as he pleads with Martha not to donate their baby’s body to science. “Promise me not to send it anywhere.”
Against such heartbreaking and realistic exchanges, viewers could be forgiven for missing out on the maudlin subplot starting to take hold. Sean is pressured by Martha’s mother, Holocaust survivor Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn), to bring a civil action against the midwife for ostensive malpractice. What might be a convincing portrait of male vulnerability soon becomes caricature; representations of a tenable domestic dysfunction turn into stereotypes. Sean goes back to the bottle and swaps working class bragging for crude aggression (strange given the recent assault allegations against LaBeouf); Elizabeth turns into a cliché of a tyrannical, hyper-materialistic Jewish mother, bribing Sean to abandon her daughter and “make sure she knows you’ll never come back.”
As such, Rooms falls apart. What started out as a cutting-edge exploration of the loss of a child becomes a lifelong affair that distances itself so strongly from Martha’s grief that it feels a bit like betrayal. Mundruczó and Wéber would have been wise to stick to the stripped-down narrative of their hit play: the heart of the film is a mother’s pain after her daughter’s heart has terribly stopped; all of the courtroom drama that encompasses the second half of the film feels like a soap opera in comparison. It makes no difference that the legal battle he portrays is based on a real case against a midwife in Hungary; the thrill and the rewarding closure of any audience streak is learning, bit by bit, what really happened. In Pieces of a woman, not only have viewers already witnessed what happened, but we witnessed it in an uninterrupted 24-minute sequence. We have seen and heard it all and we have no doubt that Eva, herself a mother, was guilty. The lawsuit appears to be a parody of good mom versus bad mom in light of the personal ordeal that Martha faces.
“There might be a reason for what happened, but we’re not going to find it here in this room,” Martha says in a courtroom monologue that looks straight out of the box. Law and order. We are also not going to find the reason in Pieces of a woman, we shouldn’t want it either. Diving into the details of maternal loss – and the messy process of healing – would be more than enough to carry the film forward.
Pieces of a woman is currently streaming on Netflix.
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