Pieces of a Woman: Courage to Face the Unimaginable
“It takes a lot of courage to be a parent.” My doctor said these words to me several months ago, and I have reflected on them nearly every day since. It’s one of the most profound — and unsettling — truths I’ve ever encountered. When people typically talk about parenting, they talk about the fierce and unconditional love parents have for their children. But they rarely discuss the courage that’s also required. To become a parent is to open yourself up to the risk of unspeakable, unimaginable pain. And no matter how many hurdles you make it through: pregnancy, birth, the first year, etc., you will never, ever get clear of it.
I thought of that courage while I recently screened Pieces of a Woman starring Vanessa Kirby, Ellen Burstyn, and Shia LaBeouf. The film, written by Kata Wéber and directed by her husband, Kornél Mundruczó, depicts a home birth that takes a tragic turn and how the couple and family who experiences it deal with grief and redemption. The movie takes on an often taboo subject — baby loss — and reveals the courage that it takes to face and transcend the unimaginable. Though hard to watch (I screened it at 17 weeks pregnant with my second child and had to take a 10-minute break to ugly-cry), Pieces of a Woman, is a profound, beautiful reflection of grief that courageously tackles a loss that our culture still doesn’t really know how to handle.
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When I was taking birth classes for my first child, our teachers kept repeating the same theme over and over again: Hollywood has really done a disservice to depictions of childbirth. In most movies in which a birth occurs, a woman’s water breaks, she is rushed to the hospital with rapidly progressing labor, and then gives birth quickly and cleanly. Pieces of a Woman honors the complicated and extremely messy process of labor and birth, through a harrowingly realistic delivery. Done in one continuous shot and improvised, Vanessa Kirby’s Martha and Shia LaBeouf’s Sean take us through the stress of finding out their desired attendant won’t be present, the messiness of breaking water, the need to poop, and all the sounds and feelings that accompany labor and delivery.
Vanessa Kirby, during a January 6th press call, commented “I was realizing that I had never seen a birth like this onscreen before, and yet you know we’ve seen so many deaths in all cinema history. And why is that? Because we haven’t had as many female writers.” While typical Hollywood depictions of birth have sanitized the process, Wéber’s writing and Kirby’s realistic portrayal (based on time spent in a labor ward and witnessing a birth) combine to create an almost immersive experience. The result is gripping and powerful.
Only moments after a harrowing, but live birth, Martha and Sean’s daughter stops breathing. The film then takes us on a month-by-month journey with the couple, and Martha’s mother, Elizabeth, as they process grief in their own ways. Martha, still bearing postpartum indignities like having to wear diapers, leak breast milk, and soothe breast pain, feels isolated and shuts down. She donates the baby’s body to the university and packs away the nursery. Sean falls off the wagon and lashes out at Martha for shutting down. Elizabeth wants justice and finally convinces Martha to testify against the midwife who delivered her baby. Through that process, Martha is able to transcend her loss and find the courage to move forward.
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For Wéber and Mundruczó, Pieces of a Woman is somewhat personal, as they experienced the loss of a pregnancy together. “It felt almost like a therapy for me,” Wéber shared on the January 6th press call. She went on to say,
“This is something we never talked about, this is something like an act of breaking silence over, almost like a taboo. And while I was writing it felt also as a healing, because I realized I’m not only writing about the loss and the tragic aspect of a story, I’m also writing about the grace and the love and the belonging and how someone can become a stronger person.”
What Pieces of a Woman does is show two things that Americans are not culturally comfortable dealing with: the loss of a baby and the way people process and overcome grief. Mundruczó, during the same press call as Wéber, said “I don’t know why it’s a taboo, but I don’t talk about it most probably because the whole act is so against the circle of life. … The silence is kind of comfortable, even if it’s painful.”
During my first pregnancy, when I expressed fears of miscarrying to various family members, I noticed that loved ones who were from an older generation were more dismissive of my concerns. It seemed that they didn’t know many women who had miscarried. I, however, had more friends and acquaintances who had miscarried that than I had fingers to count them. That’s not because miscarriages were more rare in the past. It’s because people probably didn’t often talk about them. People don’t know how to honor the legacy of that lost child. While it was incredibly scary to face the fact that I could miscarry, I knew that if that happened, I would be in good company. And I would know that it wasn’t because of something I did or didn’t do. I think that’s part of the reason why culturally, we often don’t want to talk about miscarriage or baby loss. If it can happen to anyone, it can happen to me. No one wants the illusion of safety dispelled before our eyes.
But beyond the taboo subjects of baby loss and infertility, there also seems to be a collective misunderstanding about grief and trauma. My personal experience is that most people don’t know what to do with their own or others’ emotions, unless they’ve experienced grief or trauma themselves. There’s a lot of pressure to either “solve” the problem for those we know are suffering (spoiler: it can’t really be solved), or for the one experiencing grief, to quell their emotions and move on. It’s ok to mourn, to feel awful, to cry, to feel like raging against the world. It’s ok to not be ok right away. It’s not just ok — it’s necessary for healing and growth. By not learning how to support others in grief, we miss the opportunity to build bridges toward our hurting loved ones.
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Throughout Pieces of a Woman, Sean’s character is literally in the process of building a bridge. We’re shown images of this bridge’s progress each month. But because Sean and Martha don’t know how to grieve the loss of their daughter — and because our society hasn’t always given us helpful ways to talk about baby loss — the grief pushes them further and further apart. At one point, as Martha takes apart the nursery, Sean asks, “why are you trying to disappear my kid?” They are still parents, even though their daughter is gone, but the collective awkward silence around baby loss asks us — wrongly — to pretend it never happened. It’s only when Martha can accept that her daughter lived, even briefly, and made her a mother, that she’s able to start healing.
It takes a lot of courage to be a parent.
Pieces of a Woman is available for streaming on Netflix.
