Reviews: Pieces of a Woman, Summerland

Shot in a 23-minute coninuous take, this delivery seems to proceed smoothly enough. But then something goes wrong.

Vanessa Kirby as Martha in Pieces of a Woman

Pieces of a Woman (M)
Limited cinema release then streaming on Netflix
★★★½

Near the start of Pieces of a Woman, Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo stages a scene in which a woman gives birth. It’s an extraordinary sequence, shot in one continuous take lasting about 23 minutes. The woman in labour is Martha (Vanessa Kirby), a Bostonian who holds a senior office position — we first meet her as her co-workers celebrate the coming birth. Her husband, Sean (Shia LaBeouf), is an engineer currently working on the construction of a bridge. They’re happy and excited about the imminent arrival of a baby, but Martha has decided to give birth at home and when her contractions begin, there’s a minor panic because the midwife they had organised is tied up with another birth. Her replacement, Eva (Molly Parker), seems efficient enough. With Sean by her side and Eva keeping a careful watch on proceedings, the delivery seems to proceed smoothly enough and a baby girl is born. But then something goes wrong.

Pieces of a Woman is based on a play written by Kata Weber, Mundruczo’s partner, and the drama has for the most part been successfully transposed from Europe to America. Elements of symbolism, unusual in an American drama of this sort, permeate the story (Sean is a bridge builder, Martha is obsessed with apples and keeps apple seeds in her fridge) but otherwise the drama, which concludes with a court case, is straightforward enough. Martha and Sean drift apart — Australian Sarah Snook plays a lawyer with whom Sean becomes involved — and Martha’s outspoken mother, Elizabeth (the excellent Ellen Burstyn), is more of a hindrance than a help.

The film is very well acted (Kirby won the Best Actress Award at Venice last year for the role) and well, if somewhat painstakingly, directed. To date, Mundruczo’s work (including the excellent White God) has exclusively been screened at festivals, but with this, his first American outing, he is reaching out to a much wider audience.

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Summerland (PG)
National release
★½

As an octogenarian raised in southern England during World War II I found Summerland, the directorial debut of Jennifer Swale, a British playwright and theatre director, infuriatingly unconvincing. The film unfolds in flashback as, in 1975, cranky writer Alice Lamb (Penelope Wilton), who lives in a lovely little house near the White Cliffs on the southern coast, behaves badly to some local kids and recalls, in an extended flashback, her youth in (about) 1941, when she lived in the same house, worked on the same manual typewriter, but is now portrayed by Gemma Arterton. She’s writing something about Fata Morgana, or Morgan La Fay, and the pagan Summerland, which seems to be a castle in the sky. The locals think she’s a witch; she’s certainly unfriendly. This younger Alice likes to stroll on the beach beneath her house, which she would have found extremely difficult during the war given that beaches on that part of England’s southern coast were mined and fenced off with barbed wire, as I know from experience. She also likes to drive a car around the place and thinks nothing of popping down to London (which is still being subjected to German bombing). Really? Has Swale (who also wrote the screenplay) never heard of petrol rationing? Not only did you need coupons to buy petrol but it was hard to come by for ordinary Brits during the war. Perhaps if you had some official capacity an exception could have been made, but there is no mention of this here. Alice’s local shop is stocked with fruit, chocolate, American cigarettes and other items that you just didn’t see in shops, especially small village shops, during the war.

Does all this matter? I think it does. It could be put down to sloppy research, but this sort of factual impossibility undermines the reality of the drama, and once you start asking questions about where Alice acquired her petrol you also start to question the likelihood of her taking in a dark-skinned London kid named Frank (Lucas Bond) whose dad is in the RAF and whose mum is not around. During all of this, Alice’s memory delves even further back in time, to 1926, when she fell in love with Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a woman she has been pining for ever since.

Gemma Arteron in Summerland

Arterton and Mbatha-Raw are very fine actresses but even they can’t overcome the preposterousness of Swale’s plot, the coincidences and the contrivances. Tom Courtenay crops up as the headmaster of the local school, but he can’t add much to a rather foolish affair. The child actors — Bond and Dixie Egerickx who plays a schoolfriend — are the most convincing elements of this woefully unconvincing romantic drama.