Birth opens with a self-proclaimed “man of science” speaking over a black screen, discussing his love for his wife as something that exists beyond logical explanation. What follows is an extended tracking shot of the same man running along a snowy trail in Central Park to Alexandre Desplat’s spellbinding score. The jogger hunches over upon arriving at a tunnel, collapses to his knees and dies of a heart attack, but the film then cuts to a scene of a baby being born, taking in its first experience of life. The hypnotic sequence punctuates each action with a perfectly timed musical flourish almost as if all the previous events were miraculously planned. As the man delivering the opening dialogue suggests, something outside the bounds of human understanding could be at play.
The story then skips forward 10 years, where Anna (Nicole Kidman) is set to marry Joseph (Danny Huston) but is still mourning the loss of her husband, Sean, who we learn was the man from the beginning sequence. At a party, a 10-year-old boy, also named Sean (Cameron Bright), arrives without an invitation, claims to be Anna’s dead husband and insists that the marriage shouldn’t happen. After testing the child on details about her dead husband and intimate details of their relationship, she eventually starts to believe him. The film smartly makes it clear that Anna, in her turbulent state, needs the young boy to be her Sean, introducing the idea that Anna was long resistant to Joseph’s romantic advances.
Birth had a mixed response, with the Venice Film Festival crowd reportedly booing it at its first screening. Reviews fixated on the film’s startling premise and uncertain ending that left much to audience interpretation. But writer-director Jonathan Glazer and co-writers Jean-Claude Carrière and Milo Addica didn’t focus on the plot — they left several loose ends — instead centering most of the intrigue on Anna’s conflicted feelings. She has a life-changing decision to make about whether her future includes Joseph, but she is unable to let go of her past.
Ultimately, the film explores many themes, including how we remember lost loved ones and the impossible hope behind our existential loneliness. Can we truly know the people closest to us, or are we always too distant to fully grasp them? The narrative raises doubts about whether Anna’s memory of her husband matches that of the actual person he was, asking whether we idealize those who have passed in order to deal with the tragedy of their loss.
Perhaps even more fascinating is Birth’s interest in the indefinability of female desire. Part of Anna loves Joseph, while another part of her wants out of the engagement, while yet another part of her is still processing her husband’s death. It’s so rare for a studio film to fully sit with grief rather than attempt to solve it and move past it. In one scene, Anna visits her dead husband’s brother Clifford (Peter Stormare) and delivers a stunning monologue. “It’s taken me this long, and I can’t get him out of my system. I can’t. I can’t. It’s not gotten any easier for me.” With this admission, we start to notice Anna wavering through fake smiles and awkward pauses, and we realize how on-edge she’s been the entire film.
Credit should go to Kidman, who in one of her career-best performances almost singlehandedly holds the drama together. Her stellar acting may be best exemplified in a sequence that recalls the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, with Anna taking the part of Orpheus, glancing back at the younger Sean as he slumps to the ground in a manner similar to how her husband died. Fans of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which also features Orpheus and Eurydice, may appreciate the next scene, in which Anna and Joseph attend an orchestra concert where in one of his trademark static shots, Glazer painstakingly observes Kidman, capturing her face for roughly two minutes as she expresses every emotion from intense agony to wonder and elation.
Birth deserves a reappraisal, certainly after its director went on to helm the critically acclaimed sci-fi film Under the Skin and Academy Award Best Picture nominee The Zone of Interest, both even darker and more ambiguous works. Glazer’s art creeps up on you, somehow seeming simultaneously detached and personal. While Birth investigates Anna’s contradictory feelings of dread and optimism, it also takes a removed perspective, peering into the limits of human connection. The film is a masterful depiction of the struggle to push on despite our tendencies to fall apart. Only with each other do we have a chance.
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