Suddenly the ordinary is cut off. First of all, for the viewer. He or she learns that the birth will be at home and the viewer will have to witness it — the director deprives him or her of a comfortable chair of the observer. There is almost half an hour naturalistic scene, without soundtrack — only painful groans, cries of «I am in pain, I feel sick.» Slowly creeping and peeping camera, which literally bites into characters' faces, plays in close-ups, not allowing the viewer to shyly look away. The palette is dominated by an unpleasant yellow. The viewer feels uncomfortable, the picture emotionally "breaks" him or her. However, this is fair. In a couple of minutes, the newborn baby will die, and the lives of four people will already be broken: the baby itself, the (already) criminalized midwife and (no longer) newly-made parents.
Love, sex and even a car — everything becomes pieces of the past, of a family unfulfilled idyll. Marta quits her job, sharply reacts to mentioning a child or meeting other children on the street, stops communicating with people. Every sign of social, professional, or internal life disappears. Even the house flowers fade. Everything collapses, and Martha has to rebuild it. By herself.
And she can handle it. Because, among other things, the semantic element is also destroyed. It would seem that the film is sustained following fairly traditional values. More than anything, a woman is waiting for the birth of a child, and its death is her death. But this is just the embodiment of universal human values. Traditional ones are in crisis. In contrast to them a man turns out to be weaker than a woman: he is poorer than the heroine's mother, dumber than his wife (he admits this himself), more prone to instincts (in the film, situations are parallel when both Martha and her husband seek solace in other people, but she stops herself, and he begins to systematically cheat on her), he is more pathetic (the mistress leaves him, the mother-in-law
buys his departure).
The main character also enters into a confrontation with her mother. Martha defends her independence by breaking with the traditional view of public opinion. The outside is alien to Martha, it constantly betrays her: the husband leaves, the mother behaves very selfishly, and even a formal, hired "protector" — a lawyer — sleeps with the character's husband.