The "White Widow" Vanessa Kirby may not be new to you. She played the young Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth, played by Claire Foy, in the first two seasons of The Crown, and played the dagger-wielding villain agent with Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 6: Total Disintegration. Now, the talented British stage actress has successfully starred in her first lead role film, and she has performed well. Her new masterpiece, Fragments of a Woman, premiered on Netflix this week.
Her outstanding performance in this film won her the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival. In the film, Kirby plays Martha, a pregnant mother who lives in Boston with her partner Sean (Sheehan LaBeouf). You can feel the contradiction of class division between the drug-addicted construction worker Sean and Martha, and Martha's mother, Elizabeth, is domineering and does not support them together. However, Kirby and LaBeouf created a sexual and emotional bond that was almost within reach.
When Martha gave birth, their relationship was soon put to the test. The couple decided to have a baby at home, so when Martha began to contract, Sean called the midwife doctor they had previously learned to deliver. In an emergency phone call, the midwife sends an assistant named Eva (played by Molly Parker, with empathy), who exudes warmth and confidence, indicating that both the mother and the child will be all right.
However, things did not go as expected. Just like that, a set of painful shots began, and the shooting took two days and was presented on the screen for only 23 minutes. When Martha experienced the pain of childbirth, nothing was cut or purified from the baby's heart rate drop to the stress that her own body and mind could not bear. The cameras recorded Eva, Sean, and Martha frantically trying to save the child. Unfortunately, their efforts were in vain. Kirby confronts every challenge of this disastrous scene, unblinchingly showing a strong sense of "you're there."
Hungarian director Kornel Mondruzzo and his partner screenwriter Kata Weber adapted the film based on their own experience of losing their children, so Fragments of a Woman is personal in every detail. Kirby brought us so close to Martha's pain that you could even feel her nerve endings trembling.
Nothing else in Fragments of a Woman is as powerful as the opening sentence. How is that possible? The rest of the story revolves around Martha desperately trying to piece together fragments of her life. At a grand dinner, martha and Sean, who are in a broken marriage, get tangled up with Martha's sister Anita (Eliza Schlesinger) and her car salesman husband Chris (Benny Safdie), while Elizabeth is in a lawsuit. Justin's role in the film is extremely cruel and cold-blooded, especially in close-ups, where she recounts her childhood as a Holocaust survivor.
By 70 percent of the time the film was played, Fragments of a Woman unfortunately turned into a clichéd court drama: Martha, at the instigation of her mother and lawyer cousin Suzanne, filed a criminal and civil lawsuit against the hapless midwife. Still, there's no plot that can stop Vanessa's performance from leaving a lasting impression on your memory.