Kornél Mundruczó (2020)
A few minutes into Pieces of a Woman, the main character goes into labour. This continues for the next twenty-five minutes – hardly real time but filmed as if it were, in one take; and certainly an exceptional amount of screen time to devote to a single birth. Martha Weiss (Vanessa Kirby) is having her baby at home – her partner Sean Carson (Shia LaBeouf) and a midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), are on hand, although Eva is deputising for the midwife who should have been there, which makes Martha nervous. The sequence ends with a medical emergency as the newborn stops breathing and an ambulance arrives. The remaining hour and a half of Kornél Mundruczó’s drama deals with the painful aftermath, over the next few months, of the baby girl’s death. Martha’s labour is, in effect, the prologue to Pieces of a Woman (the film’s title doesn’t appear on screen until the labour is over). Yet the starter in this case is also the main course. Ten years ago, Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours became famous as the movie-where-the-man-cuts-his-own-arm-off. Mundruczó’s film, recently arrived on Netflix, will be renowned for its marathon childbirth scene.
What would be lost from Pieces of a Woman if Martha’s labour lasted five minutes rather than twenty-five? (Apart from a chunk of time that helps make this 128-minute picture feel overlong.) First, the technical feat of the single shot; second, plenty of all-stops-out acting. The restless hand-held camerawork in shorter preceding scenes – Sean at his work on a building site, Martha at an office party to celebrate her impending maternity, the couple taking ownership of a car bought for them by Martha’s mother, Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn) – lays the ground for the visual relentlessness of the childbirth episode. (The DP is Benjamin Loeb.) Once it’s over, the film’s visual tempo slows markedly. The acting is another matter. Shia LaBeouf works up a lather even in the opening exchange between Sean and his workmates but the birth sequence is much more a taste of things to come.
Each section of the story, set in present-day Boston, is introduced by a specific date and a long, wide shot of the Charles River, with grey skies overhead. The prospect might seem to express Martha’s and Sean’s benumbed outlook after the loss of their baby. So does a brief moment between them as they sit in their car just before an appointment at the coroner’s office. When Sean says, ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ Martha struggles to find any words of reply. The soundtrack (for once) is bereft of Howard Shore’s overwrought score. Once they’re in conversation with a medical examiner, though, Sean quickly erupts into a yelling jag before rushing from the room. Soon after this comes a family meeting about a headstone inscription, on which the name that Martha would have given her baby is misspelt. Elizabeth has arranged the inscription and, when her daughter points out the error, dismisses it as ‘a small detail’. The phrase is repeated by Martha with quiet incredulity. Does she then subside into exhausted, eloquent silence? No chance. She strides away, exclaiming ‘A small detail!’ in sarcastic anger, at increasing volume. And she too storms out.
There’s plenty more shouting to come in Pieces of a Woman, more of it from Sean than from Martha, as their relationship falls apart. She’s often bleakly disengaged from him – and from her talkative mother, though she resists Elizabeth’s vigorous efforts to take charge of things. Already admired for her theatre work, Vanessa Kirby received well-deserved plaudits for her portrait of Princess Margaret in the first two series of The Crown. It was a bold piece of casting – there’s a six-inch height difference between the actress and the original, and they’re hardly facially similar – but Kirby’s confident, uncompromising playing banished doubts about her rightness for the role. Her physical authority, which recalls the young Helen Mirren, was evident even in Mr Jones (the only feature film I’d seen her in before this one) though she wasn’t able to bring much else to a weakly written part. Kirby does remarkable things in Pieces of a Woman but her character, whether expressing or suppressing emotion, is continuously in extremis. She has next to no scope for suggesting the person Martha was before having the baby.
For much of the film, you feel that Kornél Mundruczó must have been exceedingly keen to work with Ellen Burstyn, who’s now eighty-eight. She looks younger than that but it’s still hard to accept her as the mother of thirty-two-year-old Vanessa Kirby. Burstyn turns out to be closer than she appears to her character’s age when it’s revealed that Elizabeth is a Holocaust survivor. Mundruczó is Hungarian, as is his wife Kata Wéber, who wrote the screenplay. According to Wikipedia, the film ‘is directly related to’ their stage play of the same name, performed in Warsaw in 2018. The Shoah resonances of those central European connections are attenuated by relocating the story to Boston; even so, there no doubt are elderly Bostonians with Elizabeth Weiss’s background and, if she was born during World War II, she could have had a daughter now in her early thirties. It’s for another reason that Elizabeth’s start in life is unconvincing.
The revelation arrives as the climax to a family lunch organised by Elizabeth and attended by Martha, Sean, Martha’s sister Anita (Iliza Shlesinger), her husband Chris (Benny Safdie) and Suzanne (Sarah Snook), the daughters’ cousin. Suzanne is there because she’s a hot-shot lawyer who’ll be prosecuting attorney at the forthcoming trial of the midwife, facing charges of criminal negligence and even manslaughter: Elizabeth wants to work on Martha to engage with the court case. Her unwillingness to do so has already led to Elizabeth’s dispatching Sean, in spite of despising him, to meet with Suzanne at her office – where they have it off, Sean’s attempts to reignite his sexual relationship with Martha having by now failed. Tensions at the what-could-possibly-go-wrong lunch build, through halting small talk and needling asides, to a showdown between Martha and her mother, in which the older woman tells the younger to pull herself together and blames the baby’s death on Martha’s insisting on a home birth. Elizabeth then recalls the shockingly precarious circumstances of her own birth, as told to her by her mother.
During the first part of this head-to-head, Vanessa Kirby does raise, and deepens, her voice – to powerful effect. Martha quietly admits, though, that she doesn’t know what to say in response to Elizabeth’s account of her start of life in a shtetl shack, a doctor telling her mother the baby had no chance of surviving, and so on. I think Martha is speaking here on behalf of Kornél Mundruczó and Kata Wéber, who haven’t worked out how much the mother’s background or Martha’s knowledge of it has influenced their relationship. Elizabeth’s past is produced, rather, as another opportunity for top-drawer acting. Mundruczó keeps the camera tight on Ellen Burstyn throughout her big monologue, as if to say, ‘Look how brilliant she is!’ She is, but coercively drawing attention to the fact is counterproductive: viewers aware of the director’s strong-arming tactics will thereby keep their emotional distance. Almost needless to say, nothing more is mentioned about Elizabeth’s Holocaust past. It has served its histrionic purpose.
The same can be said of Sean by this point in the story. Elizabeth’s determination to run Martha’s life is fuelled by the knowledge that she has the financial means to do so and a snobbish conviction that blue-collar worker Sean can’t handle things. (It’s never clear, by the way, what Martha’s own white-collar job is.) At the end of the lunch gathering, Elizabeth tells Sean what she thinks of him and offers him a cheque, in exchange for leaving Martha and not returning. Elizabeth’s matter-of-factness in this scene is in startling contrast to much of what’s gone before but Sean’s submissive acceptance of the deal – Martha drives him to the airport and he flies off to Seattle – tells us less about him than about the film-makers, who don’t know what else to do with Sean.
Shia LaBeouf’s committed playing can’t disguise the shaky writing of his character. It’s so improbable that Sean would have a fling with Suzanne: this man, if he was desperate for casual sex, would surely know where in the city to look for it. (And would the professionally successful Suzanne use her office in this way?) The construction project he’s working on at the start is the building of a bridge. Sean sees a photograph of the Tacoma Bridge in Washington on Suzanne’s office wall and tells her the story of its collapse, in 1940, due to the effects of mechanical resonance – ‘the susceptibility of a structure to respond at an increased amplitude when the frequency of its oscillations matches its natural frequency of vibration’. Those aren’t his words verbatim (they’re from the website howitworksdaily.com) but they give a flavour of the polished articulacy Sean suddenly acquires when he delivers this speech, and which he never shows elsewhere.
A fragmented structure, echoing the title, may have worked on stage but this screen narrative needs a binding agent. The obvious candidate is the legal proceedings. Martha feels financial compensation would be meaningless; her mother sees it as a debt to be fought for and paid. I didn’t understand, however, the relationship between the criminal charges brought by the authorities against Eva and the question of damages. The trial itself is poorly done. It’s not obvious what motivates Martha to change her mind and give evidence at it. After she’s done so, she leaves the courtroom and calls into a photographic shop. They’ve been holding negatives left with them under her name, which Martha now asks to be developed: these are photos of her baby’s few minutes of life. The emotional release she experiences at seeing the images sends her back to the trial with a request to address the court, to which the judge instantly agrees. Martha takes the stand and announces that she knows the midwife did her best during the childbirth and didn’t mean to harm the baby. That seems to be the end of the trial – Eva bows her head in tearful relief – but how would a statement from Martha, who doesn’t seem to have been claiming negligence on the midwife’s part anyway, settle the matter so simply?
Coming to the film with an idea of its main themes, I immediately suspected Sean’s line of work would lead to relational bridge-building. This doesn’t really happen (unless the Tacoma Bridge stuff has a symbolic meaning I didn’t get) but Mundruczó and Wéber strenuously overwork their apple metaphors. In a grocery, soon after her bereavement, Martha picks up an apple and inhales its smell. Thereafter she eats apples regularly. She buys a book on sprouting, stores apple seeds on a paper towel in the fridge. In court, questioned by the defence attorney about her feelings when she briefly held her newborn, Martha says her baby smelt of apples. Back home after the trial, she finds the refrigerated apple seeds have begun to sprout. All this paves the way for Pieces of a Woman’s finale.
A little girl, maybe five or six years old, runs through a beautiful field of grass into a beautiful garden. She climbs an apple tree and sits in it eating an apple. Her mother calls her to come in. There have been previous instances of a significant character in a scene being heard but not seen until near its end – for example, the coroner’s office medic (Domenic Di Rosa) does much of the talking but doesn’t appear on camera until Sean has made his furious exit. It’s been hard to see any point to this visual mannerism beyond its drawing attention to itself. In this last case, the disembodied voice means more simply because it belongs to Martha, who eventually comes into view and helps her daughter down from the apple tree. Who knows whether this idyllic postscript is meant to show Martha’s real future or her fantasy of what might have been? Either way, it’s an improbably emollient end to a film which, until the courtroom climax, has been at pains to accentuate the negative at every turn. Kornél Mundruczó may see Pieces of a Woman’s miserablism as a proof of honesty and its healing ending as earned. I think he’s wrong on both counts.
12 January 2021
