It was the first time I watched a Hungarian director's film. The strong-looking beauty Vanessa in ancient costumes and the bright red color of the snake fruit gave me a feeling of "this is really Hungarian".
The opening film completes almost the first half of the film with Vanessa's tense and lengthy home birth. The potbellied mother, the bewildered husband, and the calm midwife welcomed a baby, a baby girl, who died shortly after birth, in a seemingly peaceful atmosphere. The joy of birth and the grief that comes at once are like heaven and earth.
Vanessa's life also came to another profile. She ended her maternity leave early and returned to the company, only to find that her place was occupied by a male colleague; she came to the fruit shop, but her mother's friend came to instruct her on how to take revenge on the midwife; she returned home, just wanting to be quiet for a while, The husband was impatient to have sex. Everything is different from before.
And her powerful mother also began to do what she thought was right for her daughter: throw a house party to distract Vanessa; find a lawyer to prepare for the prosecution of the midwife; drive away her son-in-law, he has nothing to do anyway. where available. Before the party started, Vanessa walked around her mother's house mechanically, and no one understood that she was the one who went through it all: giving birth, giving birth, and losing life.
This scene of a fierce confrontation with his mother is the title of the film. In the face of her daughter's "depression", the mother gave the ultimate reason for "why we must resist": because we are descendants of the Holocaust. At this moment, the long-standing memory of the Holocaust is rapidly reviving in this family of new immigrants to the United States. The unforgettable memory, the mission of revenge, was imposed on the next generation.
In the midst of such an almost unavoidable family mission and the grief of losing her daughter, Vanessa still came to the plaintiff's seat. And the mother in the seat told her with a deep ravine and a condensed face like history, you did the right thing. Here the veteran actors silently contribute to the shocking performance. The midwife in the dock, who was speechless, did not have a single line, but responded to Vanessa with expressions of anxiety, despair and sympathy.
But Vanessa thought of something. She walked into the darkroom with the film her husband had left behind—it was taken when her daughter was a newborn and snapped when she was alive. In the dark-red darkroom like a womb, she saw the moment, the moment that life was born, the moment that made her a mother, "Oh, God." She laughed, and went back to the court, looking directly at her Mother, acquit the midwife to her, to the court, to everyone, and, "I also want to thank you, you did help me give birth to a child, a living child. She is so beautiful." At that moment, tears were like Floods run on mother's face. The kind midwife greeted her with uncontrollable tears. Vanessa, a descendant of the Holocaust, also came to terms with her family's suffering.
A woman really grows up in all the pain. Born in pain, give birth to offspring in pain, accept death in pain, also bear the intersection of pain for generations, fight against it. Vanessa chose to forgive. She said it was her daughter who made her make this choice, and the constant force in her life that made her decide to let go of her hatred. The title "Women's Fragments" refers not only to the brokenness of the life that a woman was born into, but also to the broken, randomly spliced life of the woman herself. When Vanessa decided to donate her daughter to a scientific research institution, she was blocked by her mother; when she couldn't even decide the initials of her daughter's tombstone name, but her husband decided, what she fought against them was actually the simplest point : I am born, I am the master; what I am born is a life with meaning and soul, but you only think about the burial of a certain entity and the location of the tombstone. She has already suffered great pain, but the mother who loves her the most said: If you had listened to me earlier to go to the hospital to give birth, you would have a living daughter in your arms now. Here we see the essence of a woman as a fragmented passive.
Women also struggled to grow up in their roles as revenge intermediaries. The initiator of the massacre has disappeared into the dust, and people's common memory has chosen a mother who lost her daughter - and an innocent midwife, to start some kind of decisive battle and reach some kind of confession. This incredible twist, But it was recognized by people around Vanessa, and even her husband took the initiative to have a relationship with a litigator. Everyone, with the help of Vanessa's bereaved daughter, achieved compensation for their own injuries. Under the operation of the mother, the husband left, but very reluctantly. I think he still loves Vanessa, he is just an ordinary man, and unlike people who pay attention to Vanessa's nosy thing, his loss of daughter is completely ignored. Adultery with a lawyer, forcing his wife, and running away from home are expressions that belong to this native American, and he can't afford the height his mother-in-law placed on this matter. Classicism uses male revenge as the medium to complete the torture of human nature. Modernism takes the appeal of women as a constant questioning of the sins of human nature. From "Qiu Ju's Lawsuit" to "I'm not Pan Jinlian", "A Mother's Revenge" in India, etc., including Jiang Ge's mother in the real news to absolve women's injustice, in recent years, there are many examples of women's appeals, petitions, and pursuit of punishment. . We can’t help but ask, where did the men with vengeance go? Where are the images of Jing Ke and Hamlet? The film illustrates this with the seemingly unimportant husband: modernity comes at the expense of men. What we lose is men who fight with fists and philosophies, and what we lose is Socratic masculine deliberation.
At the end of the film, the ice and snow melt, the broken bridge is rebuilt, and the apple branches are lush. The mother fell into Alzheimer's, and the powerful intelligence that had sustained her throughout her life disintegrated. Vanessa was able to come to a real life without the label of "Descendants of the Holocaust". Under the tree covered with branches, a man and a woman who could not see clearly came out to look for their daughter, hoping that it was Vanessa's husband back.
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