The harrowing opening of Pieces of a Woman cuts away at the moment of the baby’s fate, but the heartbreaking sense of tragedy and loss remains clear.
Pieces of a Woman is a difficult, harrowing film that deals with the loss of a child in a direct, head-on manner, yet the baby's actual fate is not shown on screen. The film, which dropped on Netflix on January 7, is based largely on the period of grief following the death of the child of collaborators and romantic partners Kornel Mundruczo, the director, and Kate Weber, the writer. However, the scene that everyone will be talking about is an almost unbearably tense 24-minute at-home birth sequence that, despite the cutaway, leaves the baby's fate painfully clear.
It all begins happily enough; young couple Martha (The Crown's Vanessa Kirby) and Sean (Shia LaBeouf) are eagerly anticipating the birth of their first child when Martha's water breaks. While the two had planned for a home birth, the scheduled midwife is unavailable, attending to another labor, and so they have to call in another recommendation, Eva (Molly Parker), who arrives quickly to aid them. Staged as one, hyper-realistic shot, this entire sequence goes south when Eva realizes the baby's heart is beating erratically, and that the child must be delivered immediately. Pinning herself down to the bed, Martha howls and screams, a vein throbbing in her neck as she pushes her newborn baby into the world. For one brief moment, the viewers may feel a sense of relief; Eva takes a breath, but then looks in the mirror and sees the jarring image of the baby turning blue. She grabs the child, attempting to revive them; Sean rushes out into the street to flag an ambulance, and the film cuts to black.
Mundruczo takes the viewer through the entire affair with a sense of dread, but while the image of the blue baby is a shocking and disturbing one, he wanted to respect Martha's loss by not showing the actual moment of death. In an interview with Looper he says, "I really didn't want to go there. Not just because of the voyeurism, but also because I would like to tell a story about grace, love, and strength, and not just about loss and tragedy." Still, while the specifics of the death are left up to viewer imagination, it's clear from this sequence Martha's child was stillborn.
A stillbirth, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is "the death or loss of a baby before or during delivery." The CDC estimates that about one in 160 births are stillborn, affecting about 24,000 babies a year. These occurrences, though, are typically unexplainable. While certain things like high blood pressure, smoking during pregnancy, or diabetes can be attributed, it can often be difficult to find the true cause of death. Even in the film, Martha is told after an autopsy, "In 60-70% of these cases we rarely find a satisfactory explanation."
In this way, the film is less about how Martha and Sean's baby died, and more about a woman coming to terms with the loss of her child. Various characters throughout the film, such as Martha's mother Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn), attempt to scapegoat Eva for botching the birth. She's brought up on charges of manslaughter and neglect. However, as we see in the opening sequence, and as Martha comes to understand in a dramatic courtroom finale, Eva is an incredibly competent midwife who did everything she could to deliver a healthy child.
The blame for the baby's death rests not with Eva, nor with Martha, the film argues. Stillbirth is a tragedy with which far too many parents have to contend, but as Pippa Vosper, who's experienced the loss of a child herself, wrote in Vogue, the filmmakers of Pieces of a Woman "honor the experience of baby loss, telling the story with the authenticity I hoped they would."
