Grief on Trial in Pieces of a Woman
In Kornél Mundruczó s English-language debut for Netflix, a grieving mother bears her loss for the world to see.
Benjamin Loeb / Netflix
Grieving the loss of a child is a deep, specific, and enigmatic kind of pain. It’s nearly impossible to communicate to those who haven’t experienced it and subsequently arouses intense loneliness in its victim.
Pieces of a Woman explores the sensation of grieving a child; raw, lethargic, and at times confusing. Hungarian director
Kornél Mundruczó (
White God) knows that this story does not have room for melodrama – only the truths that people often shy away from.
Pieces of a Woman is most rewarding when Kirby is the emotional centre of gravity. She substantiates the perspective of a mother struggling to accept and endure an unimaginable loss in silence.
Vanessa Kirby as Martha in the film Pieces of a Woman. (Courtesy Benjamin Loeb/Netflix)
The most amusing caveat in Netflix’s unverifiable and often credulity-stretching announcements of viewer metrics is their assertion that a program qualifies as “watched” if the subscriber streamed it for more than two minutes. This has always seemed to me like a cheat. Why not instead tally the folks who stuck it out to the closing credits that Netflix makes so annoyingly difficult to see? I guess any company in the business of producing 131-minute Adam Sandler comedies doesn’t actually expect us to watch things all the way through, but their vast data mines nonetheless contain comprehensive algorithmic analyses of exactly what you watched and for how long you watched it, including when you bailed on “Bird Box” and how many times you may have replayed a certain scene from “Blue Is the Warmest Color.”
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Review: Vanessa Kirby Is Raw, Dynamic In ‘Pieces Of A Woman’
Pieces of a Woman begins with a tragedy. Martha (Vanessa Kirby) is expecting her first child with her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf). For a few minutes, we see them in the final stages of preparation for life with a baby: Shes saying farewell to her co-workers and packing up her things; Her mother is signing the papers on a practical minivan; And theyre hanging the final photos up in the well-stocked and tastefully neutral nursery.
FOLLOW US ON: Pieces of a Woman begins with a tragedy. Martha (Vanessa Kirby) is expecting her first child with her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf). For a few minutes, we see them in the final stages of preparation for life with a baby: Shes saying farewell to her co-workers and packing up her things; Her mother is signing the papers on a practical minivan; And theyre hanging the final photos up in the well-stocked and tastefully neutral nursery.
Review: Vanessa Kirby is raw, dynamic in Pieces of a Woman | Entertainment journalnow.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from journalnow.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.