Content Warning: This article contains discussions of pregnancy loss that some readers may find upsetting.
The way society engages with and treats women’s bodies is weird. This goes for all walks of life: from how women dress and what they say to periods and pregnancy. Pregnancy in particular always feels like a rather taboo topic for films to talk about – particularly when things go wrong. Research carried out by pregnancy charity Tommy’s found that in 2018, 2,060 babies were born alive every day. But every day, 515 babies were miscarried, 144 were born preterm, and 8 were stillborn. That’s 667 babies who did not survive birth every day. Over the course of a year, that number rises to 243,455. 243,000 new lives lost – but unless you were looking for these statistics, you’d have no way of knowing them. Pregnancy loss is something that happens so often, but is talked about so little. Pieces of a Woman, Netflix’s new drama starring Vanessa Kirby, wants to change this. It’s a quietly devastating little film that wants to open up conversations about pregnancy loss and women’s bodies in general and make them commonplace, and it could not have landed at a better time.
Pieces of a Woman marks the first English-language film from husband-and-wife duo Kornel Mundruczo and Kata Weber (on directing and writing duties, respectively). Weber’s heart-wrenching screenplay is partly inspired by her own experiences with pregnancy loss: it follows Martha (played excellently by Kirby), whose baby dies immediately after being born. The remainder of the film charts Martha’s grief process as she comes to terms with losing her child and the isolation that such a loss brings with it. It’s an extremely difficult film to watch, but it’s one that’s incredibly powerful and moving. It is also, I believe, successful in its aim to start a conversation: no other film I can think of grapples with the trauma of pregnancy loss so well, and feels so real and authentic while doing so.
Daredevil’s hallways can eat their hearts out, because they’ve got nothing on [Pieces of a Woman]
It would be wrong of me to talk about Pieces of a Woman without mentioning its incredible birth scene: it’s the film’s opening chapter, and it’s shot in one gorgeous, spellbinding, 22-minute long take. That’s right: 22 minutes. Daredevil’s hallways can eat their hearts out, because they’ve got nothing on this (and if you don’t know what I’m talking about then please go and watch these videos, and then go and watch Daredevil on Netflix). It’s a staggering scene, full of wonder, optimism, shock, and heartbreak all at once. Kirby is astounding, and her performance grounds the whole scene beautifully. We’re given tiny clues that something isn’t quite right through little drops of blood and the absence of a heartbeat, and as the scene nears its climax we hope to anything and everything that the worst isn’t true – but it is. Mundruczo and Weber trust their audience to understand what’s happening – we only need to see a stationary ambulance outside the house to comprehend the horror of what has happened to the baby.
It’s a very brave and honest sequence that lends the film a feeling of authenticity; when the remainder of the film is spent exploring Martha’s grief and the issues that this brings her, the audience believes it because we’ve seen it happen first-hand. We might not have experienced such a loss in our own lives, but we live this loss through Martha – through both the birth scene and the painstaking detail in which her grief is shown to us for the rest of the film. Speaking to Ella Kemp of Letterboxd, Weber had this to say:
“If you don’t do it, the whole story doesn’t make sense because you don’t establish this loving relationship—not just within the couple, but towards the baby. So I really wanted to stand for this scene. I wrote it long, because when you give birth there is this huge beauty and grace and love, and a certain kind of horror too. It’s uncontrolled and so spiritual.”
Her words perfectly encapsulate part of what makes Pieces of a Woman such an engaging and important watch. It’s an eye-opening movie in many ways, but above all is the fact that conversations about pregnancy loss like this are few and far between: like I said right at the start of this post, you’d have no idea how many pregnancy losses happen each year unless you were specifically looking for that information. It’s time we, as a society, changed that – and change is coming.
I wonder how many of you reading this will have read Chrissy Teigen’s essay that she wrote online following the death of her baby Jack last October. If you haven’t, you can find it here. It’s a wonderfully moving piece of writing that follows on from her social media announcements shortly after she lost the baby. Teigen bares her soul to her reader in a way that few celebrities do, and the resultant words are utterly heartbreaking. But at the same time, they’re also more important than that – the essay and the sentiment behind it are far more important than simply the one woman who wrote them, and Teigen knows this. Her words speak to a far greater stigma that exists in society about how we treat women’s bodies, and that stigma goes way beyond pregnancies.
It’s no secret that sex education in the UK is abysmal. It’s horrifically sexist and one-sided, and doesn’t cover nearly as many useful topics as it could. Just this morning a friend on Twitter mentioned that during her sex ed classes in high school, the boys were sent out of the room when the girls were being taught about periods. I genuinely don’t understand why this was the case, but I can attest to the flipside of it: at my all-boys high school we were never taught about menstruation, and I don’t really understand why? It was like it was a big secret that they wanted to keep from us, and it baffles me. Why didn’t they think we should know about periods? They happen to people all over the world once a month for decades, so why is the conversation so hush-hush? Are we ashamed of a completely natural bodily occurrence? If so, why? Let’s change that. The way society talks about women’s bodies is awfully outdated, and things have got to change.
There are signs that we’re getting somewhere: Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You was groundbreaking for many reasons, but one thing that stood out to me was a scene in which its main character changes her period pad on-screen. It isn’t graphic or explicit, but normalised: Arabella is having a conversation with her housemate in the bathroom and simply changes her pad while they’re chatting. It may seem like such a small detail, but it occurred to me when I was watching the episode last summer that I’d never seen anyone change a period pad on a screen before, and that shocked me. A few years before this came the third Twilight film: I’m not going to pretend to like this movie at all (because goodness do I hate it), but I have a lot of respect for a mainstream blockbuster like this using the word “period” instead of dancing around the topic like it’s one to be avoided.
The way society talks about women’s bodies is awfully outdated, and things have got to change
This may seem like I’m rambling, but these ideas are all related. People feel they can’t talk about pregnancy loss because of the way society treats women’s bodies, and that’s something that is instilled into us in our very education: just two days ago, Zoella’s website was removed from a GCSE Media Studies syllabus because she (an adult woman) dared to publish an article about sex toys. There’s a weird, sexist protective blanket around young girls that doesn’t exist for young lads, and we need to get rid of it. We’ve still got an awfully long way to go, but things are starting to change – albeit slowly. The online backlash to the Zoella situation shows people are sick of women’s bodies being censored and shamed in this way, while honest conversations about pregnancy loss are started to open up through people like Chrissy Teigen and films like Pieces of a Woman.
It’s only through conversations like this that we can get feminism to where it needs to be in order for us to have a truly equal society – and it shouldn’t be women doing all of the hard work. It’s down to those of us who aren’t women to join the fight and get our hands dirty, because it’s going to take all of our combined efforts to make a change – and when that change comes, we’ll be all the better for it. To return to Weber for a moment: “[Pieces of a Woman is] not just about the loss. It’s not just about the tragedy. It’s also about grace and love and togetherness, and how someone can triumph over grief and become a stronger person.” When we all come together and enforce change, we can all become stronger people.
Now I’ll admit that this isn’t at all what I originally had planned for this post. My original idea was extremely fiery and much more political, but when it came down to it I just didn’t have the energy for it. Maybe I’ll get round to writing it at some point, but probably not for the foreseeable future. Luckily, when I watched Pieces of a Woman the other night, I was struck with many, many thoughts, and this post is the result of days of research and thinking and struggling – but I think it works. These conversations are so important, and it’s way past time we started having them.
Looking forward, I’ve got some exciting stuff planned for the next few weeks! I’m running a poll here for an upcoming article, so if you’ve got a mo to spare I’d appreciate a response! No prizes for guessing when I’m planning to drop an article about romance movies ….
As ever folks, thanks for sticking with me – I really do appreciate it. Keep yourselves safe, and don’t forget to subscribe at the bottom of the page so you never miss anything from me!
Images: Netflix