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It's nasty: We only get to know the two decisive characters in this film as empty spaces.

One is called Barbara, and the suffering, which is everything in “Pieces Of A Woman”, takes its course from the moment that Barbara does not appear.

She is the midwife that Martha (Vanessa Kirby) and her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf) chose to have their first child.

It should be a home birth because the child “should decide for itself when it wants to be born”, says Martha.

Self-determination is something beautiful, only the circumstances have to play along.

The substitute midwife Eva (Molly Parker), who rushed in, played the already legendary, almost half-hour long, uncut birth sequence at the belching and screaming Martha with encouraging phrases like: “Good girl!” Or “You do it really, really great, like a real professional! "

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How to praise a toddler who uses the potty for the first time without an accident.

The newborn then takes a few breaths and dies - the second, the central void.

Who is to blame, who has failed?

How do you go on living?

As a woman, as a man, as a couple?

Kirby skilfully realistically plays through and suffers every word and every woe, damned unreasonable demands such as nausea and rising smells, and that is indeed unusual for a film that, after its September premiere in Venice, is now aimed at a broad audience via Netflix.

“Pieces Of A Woman”, the first English-language film by the Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó, tells, like many before him, how to deal with the loss of a child and whether it can succeed in rebuilding the self - and the social structure - that has been torn to pieces put together.

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But first of all, let me say to all film birth traumatized: Benjamin Loeb's supple camera never moves too close to the body of the woman giving birth, a few drops of blood in the bathtub, which is chastened in the bustier, and the budding baby head are the most blatant things he demands of the audience.

A pretty unrealistic gag: the newborn baby comes into the world, except for a little bit of mess on the head, squeaky clean and dried off.

You can read “Pieces Of A Woman” as the drama of a woman's growing up.

Because Martha, kept small by her dominant mother (played by the now 88-year-old Ellen Burstyn), does not at all correspond to the pattern of childlike fragile, translucent bundles of nerves that the mainstream audiovisual (dead) childbearing woman otherwise fantasizes about.

Kirby's more objective than irrational Martha keeps her feelings to herself and decides to make the little corpse of her baby available for research.

Much to her mother's annoyance.

A bridge as an emblem

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You can often read that the birth scene is the first scene in the film, but before that there is another no less important: We see Martha's rumbly partner Sean, who is working on a huge construction site with his hipster beard.

A bridge over a wide river is to be built (it was shot in Montreal, but the story takes place in Boston).

Sean mumbles to his colleagues with sentimental patriarchal pride: his daughter should be the first to cross this bridge.

The child is not there yet, but the frame of meaning in which it is to be stretched is already tied down.

The bridge is placed in front of each of the nine-month-long chapters like an emblem, a structure that is still divided into two parts that one day is to overcome a distance.

Sean, who already sees the gift of his mother-in-law (“a mini-van!”) As “emasculation”, as he says, cannot bear it if his work does not (or too slowly) lead to a visible result.

Or even being dismantled: “Why do you want to make my child disappear?” He snaps at Martha, who is clearing out the now superfluous child's room.

The series of photos with ultrasound images that he had forced on her (and then hung upside down, twisting his wife's body in order to be able to see the child “the right way round”) is symbolically broken.

It remains to be said that these two have ever found each other, and Martha's clichéd mother leaves no doubt that she does not consider the equally flatly illuminated prole Sean to be befitting.

Martha's being surrounded by expectations begins with the fact that the anticipation of a baby has to be publicly displayed (at the baby shower in the office).

And continues in the fact that the mourner may turn into a vengeance fury, as Martha's mother demands, who urges the midwife to be tried, or at least into a sexy madwoman (only admission: Martha's matted-looking hair).

Martha (Vanessa KIrby) is kept small by her mother

Source: Benjamin Loeb / Netflix

As if his partner had a postnatal duty to always turn her inside out and keep it available, Sean repeatedly asks aggressively: "What are you thinking about?"

From holy seriousness to involuntary comedy

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Mundruczó serves none of this to us.

He neither pulls Martha's world of thought outward, nor does he convince her to carry out the legal vengeance campaign.

Mundruczó's art and life partner Kata Wéber wrote the screenplay.

According to their own information, both drew from a similar experience, which they first processed into a play and now into a film.

It left behind some shocked critics in Venice and brought the leading actress Vanessa Kirby the Coppa Volpi as Best Actress.

Kirby, known among other things as the laconically witty Princess Margaret in the series "The Crown", does beneficial little to achieve maximum effect.

When, for example, she wanders around the room at a family dinner while her husband, brother-in-law and cousin gossip about the "White Stripes" that would have pretended to be siblings instead of a married couple in order not to distract from their music.

Or when they rave about the “profound sentence” of a pastor: “Time heals all wounds.” Then all kinds of annoyance and distance can be projected into Kirby's superior gaze.

Much of what the script or camera touches on is then dropped, which too often robs the film of its conciseness and tension, in favor of erratically charged close-ups of pulsating carotid arteries or germinating apple pits, with the cello and piano turning up dramatically.

Applying so thickly may be necessary to counteract the (cinema) expectations of a mother who is losing her child, something that is applied even thicker.

The search for guilt is also burdened with the Holocaust story by Martha's mother, which borders on the trivial.

Substitute midwife Eva (Molly Parker) cheers Martha (Vanessa Kirby) on with the usual empty phrases at the birth

Source: Benjamin Loeb / Netflix

In contrast to Mundruczó's previous films, realistic down-to-earth adherence and allegorical exaggeration go hand in hand here.

While the director had an army of street dogs rehearse an uprising in “Underdog” (2014) - an allegory of the political situation in Hungary - a Syrian refugee developed the ability to float in “Jupiter's Moon” (2017) and the desire for people to do so To awaken wonders.

Far from such playful heights, “Pieces Of A Woman” counteracts its holy seriousness to the point of involuntary comedy.

The fact that Sean captures the moments of birth on analog film, and that Martha can pick up the developed negatives perfectly timed during a break from negotiations and make the prints herself in the shop all by herself in the darkroom, seems less magical than overstrained in view of the realism on display.

Martha, of course, is now finally making a picture of herself and the child that has been, summarizing what has disappeared in a form that belongs only to her.

But it all boils down to the rhetorical question of whether it is even possible to “compensate” for the death of children.

As physically concrete as “Pieces Of A Woman” begins, the film becomes increasingly frayed, the more meaningful signals it sends out without being able to do anything with them.

It falls into pieces.