Anyone who knows Kornel Mundruczo and his wife Kata Weber knows that the fairy tale has always been an integral part of their cinema. From the girl chased by a hundred dogs through the streets of Budapest in White God to the refugee who hides in the woods and at some point starts floating in the air A moon called Europe, the feeling has always been that of a vote to the absurd, of an act of faith towards the magic of the world and the intrinsic forces that govern the universe. That’s why, when Pieces of a Woman, their first film in English, premiered in Toronto and then at the Venice Film Festival, the reaction was one of dismay and alienation: in the film, which will be available on Netflix on January 7th, the couple, he directing and she the screenplay, chose, in fact, to compete for the first time with a very raw realism and a personal drama that they were able to touch several years before.
The loss of a child.
The protagonists of the film are, in fact, two young cohabitants from Boston, Martha e Sean, who lose their daughter in a traumatic home birth. Although Kornel and Kata make it clear that the story is “highly fictional” despite drawing directly from their personal experience, it is very difficult to separate Martha’s character. played by a great Vanessa KirbyL’Margaret from the gods The Crown who for this role won the Coppa Volpi in Venice, from Weber, the woman who traces a story made up of silences and close-ups, of intertwining hands and solitary walks along a river. Starting from an amazing initial sequence shot that takes us inside Sean and Martha’s house just as the waters break and it is necessary to call the midwife, the viewer immediately perceives the whole range of emotions that cross the mind of the protagonists: from his uncontrollable euphoria to her terror when at the door he discovers that his trusted midwife has been replaced by a colleague . Things, without the risk of spoilers, will go wrong and lead Sean and Martha to deal the drama of loss in a very different way. If Sean and Martha’s mother, played by an amazing Ellen Burstyn, are looking for someone to blame by taking the midwife to court, Martha seems completely alienated from the world, as if the tragedy had touched someone else.
She walks the streets of Boston aimlessly, always keeps a low or barely whispered tone of voice and does not seem in the least interested in indulging the thirst for justice of her partner played by Shia LaBeouf, to the point of being almost completely disinterested in the child’s funeral and wanting to get rid of her little body by donating it to science. Together with a mother who is very attentive to the judgment of others, obsessed with “what will people say” which, after all, is the basis of many successful memoirs such as those of Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates, Mundruczo and Weber show us how if needed, that grieving is an intimate and personal process, a dimension so fragile that no one can afford to code through universal rules, the same for everyone. It takes Martha a year to put back together “the pieces” of the woman she was, and it takes the viewer about two hours to understand that his story could be that of all of us, of anyone who embarks on an emotional journey that leads him to leave a trauma behind. Beyond the procedural parenthesis inspired by a real judicial fact which involved a Hungarian couple in 2010 against the midwife who had insisted on a birth at home instead of in the hospital, the pieces of the puzzle fit perfectly at least until the last half hour, which in some ways appears too hasty compared to long time spent by Vanessa Kirby to make us understand at what stage of acceptance she is. Definitely Pieces of a Woman, which also sees Martin Scorsese among the producers, is a film about survival and isolation, about the desire to continue living and the importance of letting go of what is lost, a leap without a safety net that may scare you on the spot but which, in the end, will make you say thanks for seeing it.
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