Movie review|The work of pain and joy allows its subjects to speak and breathe for themselves, without questioning and at peace.
Document
The work of pain and pleasure, dir. Karoliina Gröndahl. 85 min. K7.
★★★
When attention is in the living and feeling human body – in its own tireless logic – the documentary film is an excellent form of expression. Eyes are often the channel through which we sense each other’s pain and pleasure.
Award-winning documentarian Karoliina Gröndahl looks at the body giving birth in his latest film, listens to its sound.
The camera can be the disembodied eye that it is at its best in a documentary film. The gaze glides over the temple and groin of the person giving birth, and fortunately does not avoid the slime and bluishness, blood and wrinkles of the child who has just been pushed into the world.
Documentary the main characters are carefully chosen. A midwife who assisted in both hospital and home births Soil frost and worked as a doula for a long time Anna-Riitta act as crossing vessels between different birthers and childbirth experiences.
The documentary borrows the voice and perspective of its two protagonists, who specialize in childbirth, in an intimate and frank way.
It is not a science documentary, but an experience report, in which the main characters are not so much interviewed as listened to and followed.
The necessary space has been left for silences.
The documentary is at its best in small, warm rooms, where the camera moves effortlessly close.
Document slips effortlessly from private to public. The physiology of childbirth is opened in parallel with personal childbirth experiences.
The multiplicity of methods and stages that can fit into a birthing event is revealed in a delightfully perceptive way, without visual or linguistic roundabout expressions.
The film’s tension or contradiction is built between home and hospital births and between medical and personal viewpoints. The point of view is so unequivocally that of the birthers seen in the documentary, that social reality with its resources and norms remains a rather thin point of reference in some places.
When talking about birth violence, traumatic birth and prejudice in medicine, the narrative would benefit from showing the conflict through film, conflicting voices and arguments.
On the other hand, giving all the space to the selected women’s own experiences is in itself a valuable speech.
At its best a documentary is when its narration relies on mothers, fathers, doulas and midwives, friends and siblings breathing in small private spaces.
The camera gets so close to the pain, the relief, the pleasure, the despair and the anticipation that there is no need for speech.
The mundaneness and wonder of the stages of birth can be felt at the same time. We are very far from the fast, dramatic and clean births of hospital series.
From extras instead, you can feel the illustration episodes in which the main characters of the documentary are naked from the moss or lounging on the cliffs in an advertising-like way.
The strength, sensitivity, intuition and humor of the birth parents become more immediately visible in kitchens and gym pants.
In the film, the performers’ spirituality, sense of community, sense of power and shared language open up a fascinating world, but the viewer is not really helped onto it.
Many may condemn the world seen as a Hihhuli-like snobbery – all the more reason that the birthers appearing in the documentary deserve thanks for their openness.
Script by Karoliina Gröndahl, production by Kirsi Mattila, composition by Salla Luhtala, cinematography by Karoliina Gröndahl, editing by Katja Pällijeff.
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