The most brutal birth
PIECES OF A WOMAN Cert 15 ★★★ On Netflix now
There is much to admire in Pieces Of A Woman but not so much to like. The acting is skilful and committed as wife Martha (Vanessa Kirby) and husband Sean (Shia Labeouf) fall apart when their baby dies during a home birth. Yet I didn’t find the film convincing. The plot is highly emotional as the couple struggle with their grief and are urged to seek revenge on their midwife. But it didn’t engage me and this is strange as the film shimmers with quality.
Kirby, who stole every scene as the young Princess Margaret in The Crown, clearly has a special skill for playing a damaged woman. In a gruelling, 24-minute opening sequence, shot in a single take, she gives birth in the couple’s Boston apartment. I doubt a fictional delivery has ever been so realistically wrought.
It is exceptional film-making. The camera glides around the room, prying into places it shouldn’t as it exposes the brutality of childbirth, and capturing the ultimate joy and the deepest despair as the baby girl turns blue.
This is Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo’s calling card, a demonstration of his technical talents in his first Englishlanguage feature. Showing off, you might call it. It is mightily impressive yet somehow uninvolving. You sense that the sheer effort involved has left the movie spent.
Labeouf is good, furiously mumbling away as the blue-collar husband struggling to cope while his posher wife turns in on herself.
There’s also a blazing bravura scene from the 88-year-old Ellen Burstyn as Martha’s mother. But despite powerful performances and the glossy production values, there is a cold heart at the centre of this film.
The camera glides around the room, prying into places it shouldn’t