Pieces of a Woman (58)
Reaching the point in the year of 2020 when a somewhat-mainstream cinema piece chooses to examine homebirth — not only in theory, but actually while it is happening - causes a counter-productive avalanche of inquiries in regards to representation, motivations, and cinematic value.
From a person who actually devoted himself - for about 9 months - in the possibility of having his kid delivered at home (but I am the male counterpart in this scenario), I was quite skeptical delving into the vulnerabilities of that period, and I can imagine people in similar position also felt the ambivalence between excitement and fear. Taking it even further, having my own experience actually taking place in Budapest in late-2018, with midwives who closely worked alongside the midwive’s story this film bases its premise on.
Kornel Mundruczo’s sensibilities are well-known to cinephilliac, and not only, audiences around the globe, his tradermark diachronically being recognised by many festivals. His dive into the Anglosaxon world came with the baggage of historical trauma paralleled to personal trauma of the present. The choice to put the film around the epicentre of homebirth works as a narrative tool of creating a space - or even better, void - around the character’s journey. Institutionalizing the processes of those characters with the presence of hospitals and doctors would certainly create a precedent around the stakes of the story, which apparently is not the story that was needed to be told here. We see two characters in their mid-late 30s, based in Boston, US, with the female family history foreshadowing the repercussions of the traumatic loss of the infant, which takes place at the first, one-take sequence of the film. Projecting my own recent experience, those 25 minutes are absolutely breathtaking in their choreography and assimilitude of actual birth scenes, and I applaud all the people involved in this. More specifically, the red line going through the needle throughout the whole film is Molly Parker’s character, heavily based on Agnes Gereb’s story (for more, see here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/22/hungary-midwife-agnes-gereb-home-birth) Associating itself with this Hungarian tragic story, which in itself conveys deeper sociological issues found in all modern societies, the story creates the necessary spaces where the characters can breath - or in this case, grieve and heal.
Criticisms across the board highlight the erratic differences between the first part of the film and what comes afterwards, retrieving to adjectives like soapy, contrived, and too melodramatic. My understanding is that Mundruczo, who wrote the scenario alongside his own wife, intends to delve into the tension between the historical and the personal, using as its anchor the unresolved historical trauma of Hungary - we are talking about a country which basically lost all of its battles, while being under several and consecutive crises, until the fall of communism. Ellen Burstyn’s controlling mother figure is a direct mirror to a generation which struggles to pass intergenerational values, while the current situation actually has to deal not only with the traumas stemming from previous crises, but the aftermath of those that have more-or-less become institutionalized. This is the reason this film partakes the legal road, where we see that things are seen quite bipolar in the pursuit of justice. We are never actually advised or hinted that a premature hospitalization (one that was actually almost triggered in the film) would not guarantee the safety of the infant, and for the sake of the storytelling itself (and the creation of dramatic conflict) Mundruczo chooses to render characters, dialogs and legal foreplay in such a way that can only be characterized as frustrating.
In a Western Society, especially in mainland Europe, where C-sections reach the oustanding rate of 50%, home-birth, the presence and essence of doulas and midwives, should be championed. Pieces of Woman uses this setting and forces in order to tell an earnest story about trauma and process, and I do feel that it is actually OK to use the backlash against midwives practices in order to bring light to this issue. For better or for worse, though, what we need the most is a strong voice stemming from the power of emancipation and free will — it should be my body, my rules, all the way.
