By Theodore Dimitropoulos
Let's just say that when it comes to the royal family. Venice Festival and the Oscar agree. Venice was the starting point of her Oscar run Helen Mirren for the The Queen winning the 2006 award for female performance in the Lindo, even before Venice became the Oscar expo it is today.
And it was only two years ago that the Olivia Colman won for the Favourite of Lanthimos, arriving a few months later to a shockingly memorable and great Oscar win. Colman later took a starring role in The Crown, as a second-generation cast took over from the first.
The Toronto 2020 Festival runs until 20 September. The ‘Pieces of a Woman’ will be distributed worldwide through the Netflix.
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So in this first generation of Claire Foy and of Matt Smith, the admittedly most enjoyable presence of the cast and the series - no disrespect to the royal couple of course - was Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret. A more pop role, clearly, but also a more unpredictable performer, with complexities, with lightness and in the parts where her arc demanded it, with an ability to capture in her expressive face a huge, chaotic void.
Kirby was always going to have a big career after Crown and this is the year of its coronation.
The English actress, also fantastic in Mission: Impossible - Fallout, starring in 2 films with strong festival buzz. The The World to Come, a romantic period drama with the Katherine Waterston, also played in Venice to positive reviews, but it was her other work this year that seems to be coming with sweeping momentum.
In Pieces of a Woman of Kornél Mundruczó that we watched at the screening at Festival of Toronto premiering today (7/1) on Netflix, Kirby plays a mother trying to overcome the loss of her baby at birth. If that already sounds heavy, then where to watch how the film opens.
Mundruczó makes his English-language directorial debut here after a couple of definitely high concept and quite misguided in terms of their over the top allegorical conception, Mundruczó's The White God and the Jupiter's Moon. His films tend to take an initial big concept, something that would be like the conclusion of another film, and make it the starting point. It would be a great approach if he had a better sense of how to tell the story that follows and also connect the scattered pieces of his film.
This is also true here: Piece of a Woman opens with a 30-minute monoplane of anguish and horror, during which we watch the birth. In this sustained crescendo, Kirby grabs the frame and is a perfect match for the sense of panic it captures. He cries, agonizes, cries, doesn't let you breathe. Next to her, in a very natural, very generous performance, stands Shia LaBeouf in the role of her husband; he holds her, supports her, looks at her. Shia gives one of those understated performances that an artist who really doesn't care about being a star would give, and I'll be very happy to see him mentioned in awards if the film gets general awards buzz.
But in any case, Kirby will be the big talking point. It presents an interpretive tour de force, complementing with stoicism and with silent pain and anger the portrayal of her heroine in the rest of the (main) part of the film, which I found dramatically weak. Where the central couple begin to drift apart through the attrition of loss. She delivers dynamically complete performances in both the opening half-hour and the more conventional approach to the following section, but her data stands out.
«I wanted the audience to be with Martha fully through this experience,» she told Vanity Fair, talking about how she approached her heroine. Wanting to capture childbirth as authentically as possible and without vanity, she did research by even watching a woman give birth. It was, she describes, as if that woman was «transported to another plane of existence. It was as if the animal of her body took control of her mind.».
Kirby seems to have a lot working in its favour at the moment, and that gives it a slight lead in the race against the other frontrunners. Frances McDormand of ‘Nomadland’, of Chloe Zhao who took the Golden Lion (but she already has 2 performance Oscars) and Kate Winslet of Ammonite, which received more lukewarm reviews than expected (and which Winslet also already has an Oscar).
The 32-year-old English actress, however, gives an undoubtedly impressive performance in a difficult role in an in your face sequence designed to shake the viewer to the point of definite shock. She won an award for it at a festival that in recent years seems to have a very strong connection with the Oscars. Her film was bought by Netflix, which has been pushing a lot of stuff in the Oscar race in recent years and no doubt has a lot of faith that Kirby can bring an Oscar for its trophy case.
And finally, this is all happening at a time when the actress already has several awards behind her, but not too many - the very definition of the young, rising star that the Oscars love to award every few years. In that sense, her trajectory seems to match more closely that of another young up-and-coming actress who swept Venice a few years ago, won the Volpi Women's Interpretation, and it was already obvious that whatever role you put in front of her, she would have a way to make it hers: Her Emma Stone, the year of the La La Land.
The main difference of course is that Pieces of a Woman has absolutely nothing uplifting like his film Damien Chazelle, but sometimes, the right combination of actor and role can create something quite dynamic regardless of mood.
