I waited a few days after watch- ing “Pieces of a Woman” to write about it. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to be able to write anything more about it than the non sequi- turs I’d typed into the notes app on my phone: “milk but no baby,” “spit- ting out an appleseed,” “unfinished bridge.” I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get in the middle of the cultural conversation about the death of the artist, delve into the twisted feel- ing in my stomach when watching Sean, the male lead played by Shia Labeouf (“Honey Boy”), eerily mir- roring the addiction and abuse that his actor has been accused of. I wasn’t sure if it was even right for me to criticize a film about mother- hood when I don’t know the first thing about it. Of course, it’s my job. In Mar- tin Scorsese’s 2021 documentary “Pretend It’s a City,” essayist Fran Lebowitz says that a story “is not supposed to be a mirror — it’s sup- posed to be a door.” But “Pieces of a Woman” feels so gripping that I felt deeply connected to the story, al- though it’s not one I’ve experienced firsthand. The extended one-shots mean- dering through tense scenes forc- ibly immerse the viewer into the lives of the two mothers at its cen- ter, Martha (Vanessa Kirby, “The Crown”) and Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”). Director Kornél Mun- druczó (“White God”) invites you through the door of the story and into a hall of mirrors, simultane- ously leading you through his own creation while connecting you to the universal experiences of joy, pain, suffering and kinship. That’s the paradox here: To offer up Leb- owitz’s narrative doors to others, someone somewhere along the line has to stare at themselves in the mirror and write down this story that may have previously spent a lot of time behind locked doors. If I’m going to double down on this door/mirror metaphor, stories about motherhood have generally been hidden behind a slightly translucent door in your grandmother’s bath- room. When you’re taking a shower to get the smell of your grandmoth- er’s perfume out of your hair, the glass fogs up and you can only see the other side if you open the door. But if you wipe away the condensation, you can see yourself — see the finger- prints and smears from when your mother and your mother’s mother have looked themselves in the face in the same spot that you’re standing in just then. “Pieces of a Woman” isn’t necessarily doing revolutionary work by portraying the realities of mother- hood, but it is pulling back the cur- tains on ideas that we maybe didn’t realize we were so naive about. Obviously, everyone has a moth- er, even if they’re not directly in your life. You’d think that after all this time, after all the Mary Karr poems and “Lady Bird” viewings, we’d have exhausted the vat of sto- ries about mothers and daughters. But “Pieces of a Woman” works best when it’s lingering on the uni- versality within the specific. We’ve all heard stories about the excru- ciating pain of childbirth and un- bearable anxiety felt by first-time parents, but Mundruczó dives into the often overlooked parts of that experience: the embarrassment of waddling around with no pants like Winnie the Pooh after Mar- tha’s water breaks, the incessant burping that comes from the rise in progesterone during labor, the dia- pers Martha has to wear when the physical trauma of childbirth affects her bladder control, the involuntary lactation in the middle of a public place. You’d think the observation of normal bodily functions would get old after a while (and at times the film does fall prey to some cliches of American drama like quivering lower lips or ham-fisted metaphors), but it’s still illuminating. 6 — Wednesday, January 20, 2021 Arts The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com By Steve Marron and C.C. Burnikel ©2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC 01/20/21 Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis 01/20/21 ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE: Release Date: Wednesday, January 20, 2021 ACROSS 1 Guthrie’s “Today” co-host 5 Apple tablet 9 Easily bruised Cajun veggie 13 Collectively 15 Possessive shout 16 Currency with Khomeini’s picture 17 “Same here!” 18 Greek salad ingredient 19 Out of sight 20 It takes getting used to 23 Note dispenser 25 Large tea dispenser 26 Geese cries 27 Native American leaders 31 Put a cap on 32 One of its first customers was a collector of broken laser pointers 33 IRS forms expert 36 Just slightly 37 Brown ermine 39 Born and __ 40 Theater backdrop 41 High time? 42 “Shrek” princess 43 Exuberant compliment 46 Some blue jeans 48 Sea-__ Airport 49 Observe 50 Morning news deliverers ... or based on a hidden word in each, what 20-, 27- and 43-Across are? 54 Late notice? 55 “The __ Report”: 1976 bestseller 56 Bangkok natives 59 Ticket stub abbr. 60 Meadow mamas 61 Fires off 62 Programmer’s alternative to “if” 63 Yom Kippur ritual 64 Heavy homework amount DOWN 1 Most common surname in Korea 2 Half of snake eyes 3 Ryokan floor cover 4 Political alliance 5 “Everything’s OK” 6 Berth place 7 Initial poker payment 8 Tie on a track 9 Instruments with stops 10 Key-cutting site 11 Raging YouTube posts 12 Sheltered from the wind 14 Plumlike Asian fruit 21 GoDaddy purchase 22 Boris Johnson, e.g. 23 Book with insets 24 Clichéd 28 Auction action 29 Africa’s Sierra __ 30 Trade name letters 33 Flaky bakery product 34 Tubular pasta 35 “Opposites attract,” e.g. 37 Kitchen bigwig- in-waiting 38 A.L.’s Blue Jays 39 Show __ 41 Black, in Biarritz 42 Rhinestone surfaces 43 __ Nicole Brown of “Community” 44 Taking a breather 45 Monet’s May 46 Record company imprint 47 Heroic tales 50 Sit for a portrait 51 Bygone audio brand 52 66 and others: Abbr. 53 Flightless bird of the pampas 57 Altar affirmation 58 Phishing target, briefly SUDOKU 2 7 6 4 7 6 7 3 4 2 4 9 7 2 7 5 6 3 1 9 1 2 7 2 4 5 9 2 1 “Coaster! Don’t mess up the table!” “I think that’s wood polish...” 01/16/21 ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE: friend of Luigi in 43 __ energy 54 N.L. East player Lesbian love in indie pop Love, and feelings of any kind really, have always exist- ed very close to the surface for me. They tend to be the main force in my life, something I find reflected in music. Pierc- ing emotions are what drive a tune — what music was cre- ated as an outlet for. This is why, one night recently, some- thing about girl in red’s music struck me, and began to bother me. It felt synthetic, made like a puzzle piece to fit a waiting niche of consumers. And then I looked around and realized, it wasn’t just her. There was a whole movement. As a pansexual woman, it’s really great to see more repre- sentation for women-loving- women (wlw) in mainstream media, especially in danceable songs. But I must admit, I have a love-hate relationship with what I’ve started to refer to as “plastic lesbian pop.” This is pretty much what it sounds like: indie pop female artists who often sing romantically about other women in a way that feels monetized — and, as such, inauthentic — such as Clairo, King Princess, girl in red and Hayley Kiyoko. On the one hand, I’ve always been a huge fan of natural LGBQ+ representation such as the songs of these artists where the love itself is the focus, not as much the struggle of being gay (although, of course, that’s vital to see represented too), as this normalizes the LGBQ+ experience. These songs don’t scream “I’m gay,” but say it slowly and steadily, without any sort of nervous rush, tell- ing us that the song is about a woman in the same casual tone that they would use were it about a man. This simple teen- age pop tells an easy, gay love story — maybe just a highly- edited version of one. However, a lot of the time it feels like the record execu- tives said to themselves: “Oh, the kids think it’s cool to be gay? Ok, let’s give them that and make lots of money off of them.” As such, a lot of this wlw music feels disingenuous, like it was made to capitalize off of peoples’ love, hypocriti- cally monetizing that which, not too many years ago, a lot of people struggled to accept. So, while I am really pleased to see parts of the LGBTQ+ com- munity be accepted and nor- malized by being put into the mainstream, I hold a place for anger against this music and its rote, churned-out feeling. Overall, I struggle with the fact that capitalism turns rep- resentation into a much more formulaic thing. When listen- ing to this music, it makes me question if there is a way for the gay experience to exist widely and successfully in me- dia without feeling like a tool being used for profit — like a box to be checked off or like there are defined pathways for how to be gay. Boiling it down to just one way of existing as a queer per- son, as this plastic lesbian pop does, spoonfeeds this gayness to the rest of a world in a way that does not break its bound- aries, and thus does not allow for full expression and rep- resentation. This pop lesbian aesthetic is a clearly marked path on how to be a cool wlw that still fits into straight peo- ple’s comfort zones. This is accentuated by the fact that this aesthetic is very present on TikTok, where the app and its users assign it a designated place in the gayness of things. Artists such as Clairo have also been taken over by “straight” TikTok, with not a lot of care being paid to the sapphic lyr- ics. The emotional vulnerability seems manufactured, the gay experience exploited; not by these artists, necessarily, but by the capitalist culture that consumes their work. It is im- portant to note that the cre- ators of the music themselves are gay, and are sharing their experiences and profiting from this as well. However, part of this trend of boppy, formulai- cally representative music is that straight people easily ab- sorb this pop media without paying attention to the strug- gle it took for these gay artists to get here, and will move on to the next trend when this one is over. Trends are the essence of pop culture, so it is inevitable that anything that is part of it will eventually pass. The les- bian/bisexual woman iden- tity, bursting onto the scene in this particular manner, seems to follow these hallmarks of a social media event, enshrined on TikTok, that will eventually fade into the next craze. How- ever, the straight relationship has existed as a trusty constant through pop culture. Why can’t the LGBTQ+ identity ex- ist in the same way? What it comes down to is that this music is widespread enough to almost be a genre. It is one of the few gay expe- riences widely accepted — one sung in somewhat generic chords, by attractive, mostly white young women — and does not capture the full won- der of the LGBTQ+ communi- ty. The beauty of the commu- nity lies in the fact that there is no one way to define “queer” — queer arises as a blanket term because there are so many dif- ferent sexualities and gender identities that each individual interacts with in their own way and on their own terms. For some, it is a central part of their identity, something they feel compelled to discuss, or else they feel they are not be- ing true to themselves. For some, it is a casual, factual part of life that they will only bring up if asked. For some, it is a hidden, denied portion of themselves. It is difficult to give an exact answer to my aforementioned question of how to properly represent the gay identity in the mainstream in a way that doesn’t feel boxed in. This is because an opinion coming from just one person could never have a hope of answer- ing for all members of the LG- BTQ+ community. Sometimes, it is more important that these questions are asked than an- swered, so that more people may consider them. The beau- ty of the LGBTQ+ community is that there are so many dif- ferent voices and experiences to be celebrated and felt. This plastic lesbian pop reduces the community down to a sin- gle kind of voice, one seraphic and sapphic, sure, but one kind all the same. This allows straight people to comfortably feel as though this makes for enough representation, and proceed to wash their hands of the matter. If a gay person complains, this music be- comes just another example they can point to, giving the LGBTQ+ community another token. While writing this, my thought process ran into many different walls, mak- ing me turn back around and reconsider constantly. I think this attitude of consistently considering and asking ques- tions is important in matters of representation; new voices emerge all the time from all different kinds of identities, and to give one answer to all of these would never work. This plastic lesbian pop is a gift in that it makes me cel- ebrate how far representation has come because this is pop- ular at all, yet also makes me think about how much further it has to go. After all, there is time, when thinking critically about music such as this, to smile at the joy and inclusion it does inspire with its docu- mentation of lesbian relation- ships, and dance a little. ROSIA SOFIA KAMINSKI Daily Arts Writer WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Doors, mirrors and ‘Pieces of a Woman’ NETFLIX MARY ELIZABETH JOHNSON Daily Arts Writer michigandaily.com Read more online at