At the Venice International Film Festival in September 2020, "Fragments of a Woman" won universal praise, and Vanessa Kirby was sealed at the award ceremony. Four months later, Netflix finally let the audience around the world look forward to see the true face of the film.
The long shot of more than twenty minutes before the title of the film suddenly caught the audience's attention, and the camera was like an audience member who mistakenly broke into the protagonist's home and witnessed the panic in front of him without blinking.
Martha and Sean decide to welcome the third member of their family at home, but the midwife they have booked is busy with other people giving birth, and it is a stranger who comes. Temporary substitutions, uneasy emotions haunt them, but also through the camera to the audience. As production continued, uneasiness continued, and eventually tragedy struck.
The film actually revolves around the family that has lost its beloved daughter and tells a story about family, sadness, and dignity.
The heroine of the story is Martha, played by Vanessa Kirby, who comes from a rich family and has a successful career. The loss of her beloved daughter, who was pregnant in October, plunged her into grief.
However, in the midst of grief, she still dutifully completes the other identities given to her by society, is still a strict female boss in the workplace, and is still an independent and self-respecting daughter in a rich family.
She didn't feel the need to gain the sympathy and pity of others through this sad thing. Her sympathetic comfort to others, especially strangers, was polite and at the same time slightly dismissive.
In the final courtroom scene of the film, the baby's death is blamed on the strange midwife. Martha calmly told the truth of the matter, and the midwife was not responsible, and thanked the strange woman for her help in her most difficult times, even if it did not prevent the tragedy from happening in the end.
Not hurting innocent people with her own sorrow, not forgetting gratitude to others with her own sorrow, not losing herself in the pity and sympathy of others with her own sorrow, Martha lives the dignity and nobility that a person needs to uphold most.
The film's male protagonist, Sean, appears as a negative image of Martha. Faced with the grief of losing his daughter, he could not extricate himself. The smoke that had been quit smoked was smoked again. Drunk, cheating, complaining about the world, and obsessed with sending strange midwives to prison. In the face of Martha's calmness, he was furious and could not understand.
The creators of the film are not simply making Sean a person who has lost himself here, but have analyzed this character from a deep level.
At the beginning of the film, Sean appears as a manual laborer at a dirty bridge construction site. We can see a noticeable difference between the dark tones of the cool tones of this set of shots and the brightness of the warm tones of the home scenes in the later films.
In fact, in the movie, Sean is an ordinary worker who marries a rich woman, he has always had an inferior feeling about the family, and in the opening part, Martha's mother buys them a car, and Sean mutters that it is his mother-in-law who sees that he is incompetent and afraid that he cannot afford to buy a car.
After losing his daughter, his painful reaction may not be entirely due to his feelings for her, and a large part of it should be that he regards her as a symbol of his existence in this family, and his grief at the loss of his daughter is also saddened by his loss of his sense of existence in this family.
Sean was almost furious as Martha disposed of the baby products, feeling that it was erasing traces of his contribution to the family. And the vicious pursuit of innocent female midwives made him feel the need for someone to pay for his tragic experience.
With the strength of his color, Martha's family naturally saw through his false appearance at a glance, and finally was sent back to his hometown by a check from his powerful mother-in-law.
Of course, this is not to say that manual workers are not worthy of the rich, or to promote the concept of marriage that is right at home. It is simply to say that when the two parties in the family are unbalanced in their ability to create material wealth, it is time to seek spiritual equality.
On the spiritual level everyone should have the dignity and nobility of self-pursuit. And this dignity and nobility does not come from the handouts of others, nor from the pity of others, but from the realization of the value of the individual to society, the family, and others, and from the pursuit and persistence of the self for upright behavior.
Through the comparison between Martha and Sean, the film shows how to reflect the value of society, family, and lovers in the face of great pain, and how to maintain personal dignity and self.
The film was the first English-language film by Hungarian director Kenel Mudluzzo. Keener mud luzo I personally think is a director who is seriously underestimated by Chinese audiences, and the previous works have just passed 7 points on Douban, and the rest of the works are below 7 points.
Kenel Mudluzzo is a director from Locarno, who has been shortlisted for Cannes five times, in the main competition three times, in one kind of attention twice, and once won a kind of attention award. Fragments of a Woman was his first film to Venice.
In fact, I personally feel that he belongs to the Oscar director, the precise control of the big scenes and the film's dramatization of the treatment seems to be more Oscar, from this point of view, this film is his first English film, the first film not to go to Cannes to Venice, should be the beginning of his new professional attempts.
"Fragments of a Woman" is a dramatized film, Vanessa Kirby's performance is remarkable, she performed not only on the face, but also on the hands, on the neck, in everything presented to the audience's eyes on the muscles.
But the film also has shortcomings, the ending is hasty and blunt, and Shaun disappears. The metaphorical symbols of apples, seeds, etc. in it are a bit boring, more like the director's self-congratulation.
But in general, Kenel Mudluzzo maintained personal observation and reflection on society when moving towards industrialized films, which is still worthy of recognition.