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AThe discussion of Pieces of a Woman, a Netflix drama by Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó about a couple reeling from the sudden death of their baby girl during labor, almost inevitably depends on The Scene. This scene is a single 24 minute take covering an entire home birth; a single swinging camera follows Boston couple Sean (Shia Labeouf) and Martha (Vanessa Kirby) from dizzying early contractions to agonizing labor on the floor, in the tub, on the bed, to the midwife of last-minute replacement Eva (Molly Parker) realizing the baby’s falling heart rate to the couple’s initial glee as they hold their baby girl and ultimately their horror as her screams fade away. Expertly choreographed and relentlessly focused, anchored by the absolute physical commitment of its conductors, the scene demands penance from the spectator. I started him sprawled out on my bed and left squatting.
The scene also became, through the press and the praise it deserved for Kirby’s performance, the film’s calling card, both for viewers on Netflix and for the awards. No serious discussion for the Best Actress race at this point omits Kirby’s name. (This is the perfect time to mention that LaBeouf’s intensity in the scene, and his boastful and forceful portrayal of grief throughout the film, lands worse than the abuse allegations made by his former girlfriend, La singer FKA Twigs, in The New York Times last month; Netflix has since removed her name from their For Your Consideration packages). The scene makes up the film’s first trimester – the rest unfold, in date-bound episodes, over the next eight months, as Sean and Martha’s wedding unfolds and his mother Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn) leads a trial for hazy criminal negligence against Eva. But that’s undeniably the film’s center of gravity and its sharp, meticulous selling point where the rest of the film is hazy, underwritten, and uncovered.
By its title, Pieces of a Woman claims to explore the shards of a person, or marriage, shattered by unimaginable loss. But, frustratingly (and without prejudice to Kirby’s performance), Martha’s trauma is the piece that gets the lion’s share. The film unwittingly ends up playing in a common trap of film and television seriously interested in female trauma: defining a woman by the worst thing that has ever happened to her, highlighting the traumatic event in gripping, all-absorbing detail. leaving all the pieces apart. cloudy, 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 terms of nuance) female trauma with the promising young woman, also titled Promising Young Woman, the writer / director Emerald Fennell black comedy revenge era # MeToo. While disparate in tone – Pieces of a Cold Breeze in Midwinter, Promising Young Woman the snap of bubblegum – the two films portray a woman reeling from irreparable trauma and star an English actor whose performance as high level brings much more depth than writing. (The two also hit the festival circuit in 2020 and made available, on VOD and Netflix respectively, last month). Both films revolve around the gripping concept of an early scene (for Promising Young Woman, a woman luring predators by pretending to be black drunk) which ultimately reveals the difficulty of articulating a film about trauma when the responses to this trauma – the treatment, retrogrades, idiosyncrasies, scope – don’t get as much attention or care as the trauma hook itself.
This is partly the case in Promising Young Woman, which covers a melted core of rage and heartbreak resulting from a sexual assault on Cassie’s childhood best friend (Carey Mulligan) in a hard shell of revenge. In Pieces, Kirby’s Martha is a withdrawn and intensely physical presence, receding from physical contact and enduring conversation with detached, firmly restrained grief. But the film, written by Mundruczó’s wife, Kata Wéber, barely gives him time or space to speak. The second half of the film winds through Sean’s escape through drugs and an affair with a cousin of prosecutor Suzanne (Sarah Snook) overseeing their criminal case, with the trial barely drawn and the fast-paced itself. even, and with Elizabeth’s toxic condemnation for pleading Martha’s grief as her own. . Where the scene of the work portrays Martha’s tragedy in clinical and sweeping detail, Martha herself remains, Kirby’s evocative performance aside, maddeningly opaque.
No movie will perfectly capture such a personal and isolating trauma, and there is a real eye-opener in seeing the often trivialized or sanitized pain brought in detail onscreen. (As evidenced by both the denial and the strong response to Chrissy Teigen’s Instagram post on her distressed face moments after losing a baby last year, or Meghan Markle’s New York Times op-ed on her grief. after a miscarriage, the pain of losing a child we barely had time to know remains stigmatized and often not verbalized).
But such revelations shouldn’t prevent dealing with the fallout from heartbreaking portrayals. The 24-minute work scene was, indeed, unlike anything I have ever seen; I just wish he treated Martha with the same finesse as the trauma meant to define her, found the shadowy path beyond the trauma as interesting as the incendiary event itself, and wanted his audience to care as much about the woman. at its center as evidence of its most shocking piece.
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