Jean Schulz on Sparky's craft and The Snoopy Show

This strip from 1967 was drawn by Charles Schulz using a rotoscope of Skippy Baxter, a skating instructor, who took his student to Grenoble for the Olympics that year. Photo courtesy 1967 Peanuts Worldwide LLC

Memories of the garish Peanuts Movie (2015) were still fresh when I started watching The Snoopy Show, a six-episode Apple TV+ series. Happily, I was struck by the fealty of the series to, and respect for, Charles M. Schulz's strip. The stories were familiar, either taken from the comics or a variation on familiar themes: Charlie Brown and his inability to fly a kite, Lucy and her psychiatrist’s stand, Schroeder and his love for Beethoven. At the heart of it all is Snoopy, writing his autobiography, flying on top of his doghouse, rooming with his feathered friend, Woodstock.

More than the source material, the animation itself felt comfortingly Schulz-ian, aware of movements and rhythms implied in the pen-and-ink still images. The series makes no real attempt to locate the characters in the modern world, so there’s a timelessness to the proceedings. The score by Jeff Morrow is jazzy, playful, reminiscent of the classic soundtracks by Vince Guaraldi for the TV specials A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966).

Charles Schulz died in 2000, just before his final strip was published. His wife, Jean Schulz, is president of the board of directors at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California. She brainstormed briefly at the start with the makers on The Snoopy Show, though it was Craig Schulz, Charles’ son from an earlier marriage, who acted as one of the executive producers. She spoke to Lounge over Zoom about the difficulties of translating the strip on screen and how Charles—whom she referred to by his nickname, Sparky—learnt a valuable lesson about authenticity.

Did you have a hand in choosing the stories that were used in the episodes?

Not me so much. In the very beginning, we had a larger group who threw out ideas. With 17,000 comic strips and 50 years, there are a lot of continuous stories that you can follow. I think they based (some of the episodes) around specific holidays, like Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, the first day of spring and so forth.

I have not been in on the creative side because there’s another member of the family, Sparky’s son Craig, and his son. There’s an expression, too many cooks spoil the broth, so I let them do that.

What is the hardest part of translating the strip to the screen?

I think the hardest part is that the drawings were never meant to be realistic. Even in animation which is not quite realistic, you still have to have movement and actions that require them to study the drawings, and not distort them so you don’t recognise Snoopy any more.

You had said in an interview that there were certain things in animation—the slope of Snoopy’s head, for instance—that fans will immediately take note of if they are different from the strip. Part of the difficulty is that it’s such a spare strip that small things are magnified.

The animators started with the idea of doing some Snoopy animation three years ago. They have been working till now to make sure the product is ready for primetime, as they say. It was a lot of studying and looking at how you could draw Snoopy’s eyes and express in animation the same thing they express in the comic strip without any words.

Charles was a master at suggesting movement, with just a few extra lines and changes of angle. Did he use films or real-life models when sketching?

Sparky believed that everything in the comic strip should be authentic, because that was important to him. For one strip with a particular skating move, the double axel, he rotoscoped a man from our arena doing it. He studied that so he would get it right. Any skater would recognise that movement, Snoopy bending his right knee—though dogs don’t have knees—to get around. A skater would appreciate that: They know that he has respect for their skill.

I always say the same thing: Sparky learnt this early on, because he loved classic music. Very early on, he did a cartoon of Schroeder with actual musical notes in it and someone wrote to him saying “I see Schroeder’s playing Beethoven’s something”. And Sparky realised that what he cared about, that reader cared about. He said, if you draw and write to their interest and their intelligence, you have got a fan for life. So I think he learnt very quickly that people appreciated you writing up to them, not expecting them to come down to your humour.

How did Charles feel about animation?

I think when he and Bill Melendez and Lee Mendelson started doing the classical Christmas and Halloween episodes, he realised that animation could do something he couldn’t do. He said to Bill, how are you going to make Snoopy fly? Bill said, oh you wait, I can do it. And so he had this wonderful scene in the Halloween special, with Snoopy going through the sky in his plane. I think that showed Sparky that animation had something to add to the comic strip—that his characters could be animated and have an additional impact to just the flat page.

The series feels like it exists out of time. There’s little in it that places the characters in today’s world.

Our interest, the Schulz family and the Creative Associates studio, is in presenting the characters and the atmosphere that exists in the comic strip. For us, it all goes back to the strip. We feel that there is enough content in 50 years of comics that they don’t have to go outside and make up jokes about cellphones and computers and all sorts of things and there is some value that people will like.

The other thing that has always been different about The Snoopy Show is the pacing—it’s always a little bit slower than kids’ animation, which is often frantic and fast-paced and something had to be going on all the time. I think they have made it a little bit faster but not much. I think it has kept the same calming timing and pace that I hope parents will appreciate.

'The Snoopy Show' is streaming on Apple TV+.

Wild tales: Beginning and Dead Pigs

There’s nothing quite like an accomplished debut film. It’s a thrill to see someone marshal the hundreds of moving parts that make up a feature into something fluid and distinctive on their first attempt. And critics love betting the house on debuts, for it allows them to say, I've just discovered someone amazing.

Two recent debut features, both by women directors, are part of the MUBI roster this month. Déa Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning (2020) was added on 29 January (there’s a conversation between her and director Luca Guadagnino appended to the film on MUBI). And from 12 February, Cathy Yan’s Dead Pigs (2018) will stream exclusively on the platform. The films could not be more different, yet they are united by the evident control of their makers and the specificity of their vision.

Beginning made the official selection for the Cannes Film Festival last year, and could well have been among the awardees had the festival taken place. It’s a formidable work by Georgian director Kulumbegashvili, a 100-proof distillation of art film rigour and patience. If this makes Beginning sound a bit forbidding, that is my intention. It begins with an attack on a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses in a provincial Georgian town, a long uninterrupted sequence observed at a remove by a static camera. The same technique is maintained through the film: extended, unbroken scenes, with the camera only moving on rare occasions.

After the attack, which we learn is just one of several the community has suffered, we see the fallout through the eyes of Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili), wife of religious leader David (Rati Oneli, also the film’s co-writer). She is—or was—an actor, having given that up for her husband’s career. They have a precocious young son, and while she’s affectionate to the boy, she’s unmoored and unhappy in her life. A visit from a shadowy detective results in more trouble—the scene where they are talking in her house is made scarier by Kulumbegashvili’s severe framing (when the camera slowly pans, the movement gave me a start, which is testament to the oppressive stillness of the scene till then).

Mexican director Carlos Reygadas is executive producer, and there’s something of his mix of brutality and austere beauty in Beginning. But the film is its own thing—though that experience can be difficult, even for someone versed in the ways of slow cinema. There’s a seven-minute static shot of Yana lying on the grass, a scene both believable and difficult to sit through. Despite its formal beauty, Kulumbegashvili’s control and subtle grasp of colour, this unforgiving film requires considerable commitment from the viewer.

It was a relief to follow the rigours of Beginning with the easy charm of Dead Pigs. Cathy Yan’s comic drama is set in Shanghai, where, for reasons unknown, pigs start to die. They are thrown into the canal by farmers and wash up on the banks (this actually happened in 2013). One such farmer is Old Wang (Haoyu Yang), an eccentric indebted to a couple of impatient lenders. He reaches out for a loan to his sister, Candy Wang (a scene-stealing Vivian Wu), the tough-as-nails owner of a hair salon who is having her own problems, with a big corporation looking to convince her to move so they can build a posh neighbourhood where her family home is. And there’s Yang’s son, Wang Zhen (Mason Lee), a waiter in love with a rich girl, Xia Xia (Meng Li), who visits his restaurant with her friends.

Yan interweaves these strands into a funny and caustic look at modern-day China, with its pampered youth listening to American pop and the middle class sold dreams of VR sets and “Spanish” housing projects (there’s a fourth, less successful, subplot concerning an American architect with the company that’s trying to evict Candy). The tone is never far from satire but there’s a palpable concern for ordinary folk swept aside by the juggernaut of capitalism. There’s a lovely scene where Zhen, whose father thinks he’s a successful businessman, takes the old man for lunch at a fancy restaurant. It’s an exquisite bit of role-playing, with Lee assuming the brisk manner of a time-strapped executive even though he’s in as bad shape as his father (he becomes a professional accident victim for a spell).

Yan, who lives in New York, made the jump to studio films with her sophomore effort, the Harley Quinn solo vehicle Birds Of Prey (2020). You can see seeds of that in the use of pop music and the wacky humour of her debut. My favourite bit in Dead Pigs is when, for no good reason, it turns into a musical. The song is I Only Care About You by Teresa Teng, the late Taiwanese singer popular in mainland China despite her criticism of the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989. Fittingly, there’s a hint of another, more recent protest in this sequence. When the actors unfurl coloured umbrellas, it’s tough not to think of the pro-democracy protests of 2014 in Hong Kong: the Umbrella Movement.

No Oscar season, no problem

(Written in the runup to the 2021 Oscars)

Film critics around the world have been waking up to an unaccustomed quiet these past months. It’s the absence of a sound that normally overwhelms everything else this time of the year: the churning of the Oscar mill. The Academy Awards are usually announced in January and given out in February. But the year, the ceremony has been pushed to 25 April. This, and the long closure of theatres due to the pandemic, has thrown the awards season out of whack.

I, for one, couldn’t be happier. In a normal year, from around September to February, everything becomes about the Oscars. Big studios roll out their prestige films, the ones with some combination of Pitt, Streep, DiCaprio, Bale and Lawrence. Smaller studios release indies they bought at Sundance. The movie press pits film against film, actor against actor, in an endless series of prediction pieces. All other awards feed the Oscar sweepstakes, resulting in pieces whose headlines read “What does the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award screenplay win for this plucky no-budget film mean for its Oscar chances?”

For six months every year, American studios conspire to reduce cinema to a handful of (mostly English language) films: not the year’s best, just the best-distributed. And everyone plays along, as if there's no choice but to choose sides. But covid-19 has messed with the machinery. Oscar-bound films are releasing in theatres across the world at different times, or not at all, or on different streaming platforms. Screeners will, of course, be going out to the voters, but the surrounding din is noticeably reduced. After all, the prospect of discussing the chances of films you haven’t seen—films which, depending on streaming services in your country, you may not see at all—isn't inviting.

The fallout is there’s no clear field of Oscar candidates this time. The forthcoming Golden Globes—surely one of the strangest international film awards, given out by a body of journalists writing for foreign publications but living in southern California—on 28 February might give us some idea who’s in contention. At the moment, it’s a wide-open field. Is Frances McDormand a Best Actress front-runner for Nomadland? Could the Korean-language Minari muscle into the main categories? Where do Borat and The Trial Of The Chicago 7, Da 5 Bloods and Mank and Judas And The Black Messiah figure? It’s up in the air at the moment, which is allowing everyone the mental space to evaluate these films as films and not as “Oscar hopefuls”.

There’s another reason for the ferment. It was only last year that Parasite pulled off the biggest surprise in Oscar history, becoming the first non-English film to win Best Picture, in addition to Best Director, International Feature and Screenplay (Roma might have broken that particular glass ceiling in 2019 had Best Picture not been given, inexplicably, to Green Book). In 2018, The Shape of Water won over the more credentialed Dunkirk, Phantom Thread and Call Me By Your Name. And in 2017, the indie Moonlight beat the highly touted La La Land. With three Best Picture trophies in four years going to what would not long ago have been considered wild cards, Oscar winners have become tougher to predict, even if the larger selection is still depressingly English- and major studio-oriented.

Even though the Oscars aren’t being rammed down our throats yet, it’s difficult to stop looking at the film world through that lens. Last month, watching One Night In Miami, I wondered which of the four fine central performances would qualify as supporting turns and which as leads. Discussing the astonishing physical performances of Vanessa Kirby in Pieces Of A Woman and Riz Ahmed in Sound Of Metal with a friend, my friend and I lapsed into Oscar-talk. We have been conditioned to think like this, to categorise and winnow. But it’s not that difficult to stop, take a moment and remind oneself that there are more sensible ways of engaging with cinema than pitting films against each other.

The Oscar season is not yet upon us. Enjoy the quiet while it lasts.

Euphoria Special Part 1 and 2: Both sides now

F*ck Anyone Who's Not A Sea Blob opens with a scene so simple and radical, so instantly mesmerizing, that even someone who hasn’t watched Euphoria might feel its power. It starts with a closeup of Jules' (Hunter Schafer) face as her therapist asks her why she ran away. We cut to an extreme closeup of her eye, in which is reflected moving images from the show's first season. The moments flash by, Jules cycling, dancing, kissing, brandishing a knife, indistinct and warped, the light around the eye changing from indigo to magenta to amber, as if we’re watching her watch a film of her life.

All the while, Lorde’s Liability plays, an inspired choice in a show that excels in accurate needle drops. As images of Rue (Zendaya), Jules’ best friend and, briefly, romantic partner, flash in her eye, we hear: So I guess I'll go home/Into the arms of the girl that I love/The only love I haven't screwed up/She's so hard to please/But she's a forest fire. Both Rue and Jules are forest fires, impossible to predict or control, and the chorus (They say, you’re a little much for me/You’re a liability) could apply to either. The two-and-a-half-minute sequence ends with Lorde singing You're all gonna watch me/ Disappear into the sun, as the show's title slowly fades.

Season one of Euphoria—an HBO show about the tumultuous lives and many, many troubles of a group of American high schoolers—ended with Jules telling Rue she loves her but also another girl she hooked up with. They make plans to skip town together but Rue backs out at the last moment and Jules leaves, causing Rue, a drug addict who’d just found a measure of sobriety, to spiral into usage again. The strain of the relationship ending hangs over the episodes, both set on Christmas Eve, and released on 6 December and 24 January (they’re available, along with the show’s first season, on Disney+ Hotstar). One might see them as lockdown episodes—there’s only Zendaya, Schafer, Colman Domingo and a handful of other actors—but director and series creator Sam Levinson finds surprising ways to shoot, cut, edit and score what would otherwise be talky single-location scenes.

Jules’ conversation with her shrink is punctuated with moments from the timeline of the first season and after. Taking off from the elliptical beginning, these scenes are framed in a way where it isn't always clear whether we’re watching a memory or a dream. For the first time, we hear Jules speak about being a transgender girl and possibly stopping hormone therapy (Schafer, who is a trans woman herself, co-wrote the episode with Levinson). While still in love with Rue, she speaks about how her friend’s sobriety always felt like her burden. She also confesses to still being in love with “Tyler”, the persona their brutish jock schoolmate Nate adopted while sexting her. It’s a lot of pain for 50 minutes—Euphoria episodes always are—yet Schafer is so open and wrenching that it almost feels like catharsis.

Though Rue’s episode also takes the form of a counselling session, it’s entirely unlike Jules’ in other respects. It opens with Rue and Jules living together, waking up happy. It’s a vision of domesticity so blissful even the most fervent shipper might be suspicious—and it isn’t a shock when it's revealed to be false. In reality, they're still separated and Rue’s spiral continues; she snorts a pill in a diner restroom before emerging to talk to her sponsor, Ali (Domingo). He figures she’s high almost immediately, and the rest of the episode is a wide-ranging conversation between them.

For a show as visually restless as Euphoria, to stick to a single location and two characters for the length of an episode is a challenge. Trouble Don’t Always Last is in the tradition of the Very Special Episode, where wisdom is imparted about some social ill. It’s a TV trope susceptible to sermonising, and though the conversation here is typically soul-baring (and wonderfully performed), the back-and-forth between the two does at times resemble a well-worked-out teleplay. But Levinson shoots the hell out of it: the loving closeups of Domingo and Zendaya, the muted nighttime colours, the glides and pans of the camera, the shots through and off reflecting surfaces.

Asked by Ali to name a power greater than her, Rue lists a truck, the ocean and any song by Otis Redding. The mention of the soul singer is a curiously dated one for this show, joining other old-timey references in this episode like Minnesota Fats and It’s a Wonderful Life. But there’s another reason Rue might be drawn to Redding: he died at 26, and, as she later admits, she doesn’t see herself around on earth for much longer. Any other show would have used this as an excuse to play some Otis. But Levinson opts for Moses Sumney instead. Me in 20 Years plays as Rue gets a text message from Jules and is devastated, while Ali, outside, talks on the phone to his estranged daughter and grandson as Sumney’s cries build to a crescendo. It’s a pure Euphoria moment, pain and hope and sadness and a great song all mixed up.

'Trouble Don't Last Always' and 'F*ck Anyone Who's Not a Sea Blob' are streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.

The White Tiger: Review

On the shortlist of cursed subgenres is the Explaining India prestige film: sprawling stories for foreign viewers whose only impressions of the country are from '90s Bollywood or Merchant-Ivory productions. These are usually adapted from a book that’s won some international award. They’re often by foreign directors, or Indian ones based abroad. And though they’re set in India, the primary language spoken is English.

After Slumdog Millionaire, Midnight’s Children and A Suitable Boy, The White Tiger is the latest prize-winning Indian novel to be adapted for the screen—in English. You might wonder why this is a problem: after all, the books are in English too. But there’s a big difference between reading words on a page and hearing them aloud. It’s easier to imagine characters in a book speaking their native language even when the dialogue is written in English—something that’s impossible when it’s spoken. Also, on the page, the reader controls the accents, (BBC's A Suitable Boy realised this too late).

Language and speech are the first, second and third of The White Tiger’s problems. Adapted from Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning 2008 novel, the film, by American director Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop), is the story of Balram (Adarsh Gourav), a poor, backward caste village boy who manages to get himself hired as the driver of an America-returned couple, Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas). He follows them from Dhanbad to Gurgaon, all the while juggling his conflicting desire to serve his “master” and raise himself up in life. Balram speaks with family members and others of his class in Hindi, but addresses Ashok, his boorish brother (Vijay Maurya) and father (Mahesh Manjrekar) in the sort of stilted but ornate English that Indians often speak in foreign productions.

Balram’s voiceover, too, is in English, Adiga’s prose diminishing remarkably in the journey from page to screen. “India is two countries in one: an India of light and an India of darkness” is an observation so trite it should be at the top of the banned phrases memo they give outsiders writing about India. Effective sentences in a novel don't necessarily make for effective lines in a film, something Bahrani—who’s been friends with Adiga since their undergraduate days at Columbia University—can’t seem to accept. I nearly choked when I heard, “A good servant must know his masters from end to end, from lips to anus.”

A more potent metaphor is when Balram compares the lot of hired workers in India, loyal to employers who mistreat them, to roosters in a coop at a meat shop, seeing their kind slaughtered yet never rebelling. He is an example of this himself, verbally and physically abused by Ashok’s brother and father. Ashok is kind to him, though not enough to fight his family; Pinky is the only one who’s appalled by his treatment. The White Tiger is, to its credit, hardly enamoured of India; the focus always returns to inequalities of caste, class and religion. But there’s little to alleviate the sour social criticism: no beauty, no propulsion. Balram’s occasional dream sequences could have been a chance for some style and wit to creep in, but Bahrani shoots these straight, as if to exaggerate would be disrespectful.

Rao goes all in on his American accent, with dazzlingly weird results—"caste", which Indians pronounce as "käst", becomes an Americanized "kæst". His pairing with Chopra, who speaks in real life like her character in the film, makes him sound even worse (the most successful Indian actors in films abroad have been those who never felt the need to mask their English speaking style: Om Puri, Anupam Kher, Irrfan Khan). Gourav, who gave notice of his talent in Rukh, is alternately sympathetic, sly and ruthless. In his attempts to forcibly alter his expected life trajectory, Balram is a cousin to Serious Men’s Ayyan Mani, smart enough to play on the vanity of those in power to improve his station.

Serious Men—another adaption from a famous novel, but in Hindi and with an Indian director—is a useful comparison. Sudhir Mishra's film is similarly caustic but a good deal more fluent and relatable than Bahrani's, and its understanding of caste politics and social mobility has more nuance (it’s also much funnier). Neither does The White Tiger have the manic energy of Slumdog Millionaire, though it does make a sly reference to it (“There isn’t a million-rupee gameshow you can win”). Balram’s ascent to power isn’t unbelievable but it is abrupt, achieved in a manic 10 minutes. He describes himself as going from “social entrepreneur to business entrepreneur”, adding wryly, “It was not easy.” Instead of dwelling on his degradations at the hands of his employers, a little more of this journey would have been welcome.

Bollywood is conspicuous by its absence in Bahrani's film. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro plays on TV, but mainstream films, the kind Balram and Ashok might watch, are missing. At a critical juncture, the voiceover speculates about what a “typical Hindi film” might do in that situation. But The White Tiger never reaches a vantage point high enough to be able to look down on Hindi films, typical or otherwise.

One Night in Miami: Review

There’s always been a tendency in cinema to zealously guard against any impersonation of theatre. The influence of dance, painting and still photography on film are all encouraged—but a hint of theatre and purists start complaining about the action being stagey. This was an understandable concern in the first 50 odd years of cinema, with the medium staking its claim as an art form, though after 125 years you’d think they would stop worrying.

One Night In Miami is visibly derived from a stage play, and is none the poorer for it. Writer Kemp Powers adapts his own 2013 production, a speculative historical account of a meeting between four prominent African-Americans in 1964: boxer Muhammad Ali, Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke and football star Jim Brown. After Ali (then Cassius Clay) beats Sonny Liston to win the world heavyweight title, the quartet gets together at Malcolm’s invitation to party—though it’s a hilariously dour party, in a bare motel room, Nation of Islam guards keeping watching, no alcohol or food except ice cream.

Each of the characters is in a state of flux in their lives (so is the black community: the church bombings in Alabama happened a few months earlier). Malcolm is having trouble with the Nation’s top brass. Brown is embarking on a film career—a gamble where his football career is steady. Clay, despite his respect for Malcolm as a mentor, is having last-minute jitters about adopting Islam. And Cooke, though outwardly secure, has been shaken by a young white kid out of Minnesota and his songs about social injustice. In exposing these vulnerabilities, Kemp frames the unique challenge of black celebrity in America: what does it mean to be the successful and wealthy hero of a community that is always fighting for its rights?

The primary fault line is between Malcolm and Cooke, comically foreshadowed by the singer arriving at the motel before the others and looking disgustedly at the arrangements. Cooke just wants to celebrate, but Malcolm keeps needling him about his popularity with white audiences and his lucrative move from church-inspired singing to pop stardom. At one point, he plays Blowin’ in the Wind as an example of the kind of song Cooke ought to be writing, not knowing that Bob Dylan is already in Cooke’s head. The film is bookended by two Cooke performances: a disastrous one at the all-white Copacabana at the start, and the debuting of his epochal A Change is Gonna Come, written in response to Dylan, at the close. There's also a bridge—a gig in which Cooke, bombing in front of a black audience, does something magical.

One Night In Miami is directed by Regina King, a fine actor most recently seen in the HBO series Watchmen. In her first film at the helm, she draws wonderful performances from all four leads. Eli Goree is the scene-stealer, channeling Clay’s non-stop patter and bouncy enthusiasm. Aldis Hodge’s Jim Brown is quietly arresting, breaking up fights, content to watch his three talkative friends duke it out. Leslie Odom Jr, who originated the part of Aaron Burr in Hamilton on Broadway, is fascinating as the thin-skinned, mercurial Cooke (he also hits those signature high notes beautifully).

And there’s Malcolm, played by Kingsley Ben-Adir as a man of tremendous resolve, little humour and plenty of self-doubt. Ben-Adir’s speech patterns kept reminding me of Obama—and I later read that the actor shot this and The Comey Rule, a 2020 series in which he played Obama, simultaneously. Still, I suspect this was also a deliberate choice by Ben-Adir and King, encouraging the viewer to make a subliminal connection between two very different leaders. Denzel Washington’s portrayal in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1994) has a harder edge; Ben-King, by allowing his Malcolm to be rueful and somewhat desperate, brings an element of pathos not always associated with the famously strident activist.

There’s one patently off-key moment, when Malcolm and Clay are praying and the soundtrack becomes a vaguely Middle Eastern melody. Even in a film with American Muslims at its centre, Islam is somehow Orientalised. Apart from this, Terrence Blanchard’s score, and the film itself, are pleasingly spare and focused. This is, of course, the time of year when historically minded films are released, in the hope of catching the attention of Oscar voters. One Night in Miami doesn’t attempt anything novel. Instead, it’s an example of old-fashioned filmic virtues: smart, snappy script, tight ensemble, unobtrusive direction.

One Night in Miami is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Pieces of a Woman: Don't look away

(This piece is a spoiler if you're unaware of the film's central storyline)

Single takes are deployed so well and so often for action or choreographic purposes now that it’s surprising when a film uses them for dramatic, rather than technical, ends. A long, tense scene without cuts imprisons the audience, forces them to reckon with what's unfolding in real time on screen. There’s an unbroken scene at the start of Pieces of a Woman that runs to 23 minutes. When it was over, I realised I was winded. Denied the momentary release of cuts, I'd been taking infrequent, guilty breaths, as if to do more was an indulgence in such a charged situation.

Kornél Mundruczó’s film starts with Sean (Shia LaBeouf) ending his work day at a construction site and his wife, Martha (Vanessa Kirby), ending hers in office. They meet at the dealership to pick up a new car. Sean has a gift for his wife, a framed photograph of a sonogram of their unborn baby, expected any day. Martha is moved but amused—the scans are upside down; a small premonition. At home, she hangs it on the wall, lowers herself into a rocking chair. There’s a cut, the last one for a long time.

Leaning against the kitchen counter, Martha feels uneasy. Sean calls their midwife, Barbara (they have decided on a home birth). But Barbara is busy with a delivery, so another midwife, Eva, is dispatched. Martha’s water breaks. She’s in considerable pain, but manages to smile through it and tell the nervous, solicitous Sean he looks handsome.

Eva (Molly Parker) turns out to be calm and confident, checking on the baby’s heart rate, coaxing Martha to the bathtub. It’s here, almost 15 minutes into the scene, that Mundruczó does something unexpected. As Sean checks in on Martha, the camera moves in for a closeup. They kiss, and we hear Howard Shore’s score for the first time. It’s a bold choice, for it reminds us that we’re witnessing performances, a scene, a film. But it also underscores a moment of beauty and hope—just before things go wrong.

In the bedroom, Eva instructs Martha to push. Kirby’s physical performance in the scene is astonishing, a succession of grimaces, winces, curses, groans and shouts. She’s nauseous, so she belches loudly from time to time. After a point, she lets loose. One of her roars is the scariest, most primal sound I’ve heard in a film.

Eva checks the baby’s heart rate again, tells Sean in confidence that they might have to transfer his wife to a hospital. But Martha insists on delivering there, so they keep trying. Mundruczó still won’t cut, so we’re right there with them, the camera moving unobtrusively, honing in on faces. “Any cut is an alternative for an audience to step out,” the film’s cinematographer, Benjamin Loeb, told Little White Lies. “By not doing that, you’re stuck in whatever feeling you have and there’s no way out”. It’s excruciating and astonishing—childbirth as exorcism, as cosmic miracle, the sort described by Patti Smith on the 1975 track Kimberly (I rolled in the grass and I spit out the gas/ And I lit a match and the void went flash/ And the sky split and the planets hit).

The baby is delivered. Eva hands her over to Martha, allows herself a moment of pure relief. The camera follows her as she looks at the couple behind her in a mirror. We can’t see what she does, but her expression changes. The baby is turning blue. Sean runs out into the street to hail the ambulance. The last few seconds of the scene are Martha and Eva trying to revive the baby.

Mundruczó and his partner Kata Wéber, the writer of the film, lost a child to a miscarriage. They wrote a play whose central characters go through a similar ordeal, which in turn inspired Pieces of a Woman. It’s easy to imagine this scene being as harrowing on stage as it is on film, perhaps even more so. There’s a reason not many films focus on the act of childbirth: it’s all too real. So much easier to make light of it (as in Nine Months or Knocked Up) or to condense the act in a familiar, impersonal manner—some screaming, a doctor yelling ‘push’, a crying child handed to an exhausted mother.

Pieces of a Woman points to the falseness of such scenes, yet it is also an example of the risks involved in depicting honestly the process of childbirth. The scene seems to sap the film’s energy. It’s not as if it goes on to strike a false note, just that the remaining hour is nothing we haven’t seen before. Whereas those 23 minutes are unlike anything else.

Pieces of a Woman is streaming on Netflix.