Hollywood has long had a problem with fantastique cinema: Those who could happily accept The Exorcist 's demonic possession – once all the other possibilities had been systematically eliminated, of course – were nonplussed by The Shining . Too much about Jack Torrance's breakdown and connection with the Overlook Hotel "didn't make sense"
This, you sense, is the tension facing Birth director Jonathan Glazer. He's got a story, co-authored by Return of Martin Guerre writer and frequent Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière ( Belle de Jour , That Obscure Object of Desire etc), that could work either way as a ten-year-old boy (Cameron Bright) shows up at a woman's (Nicole Kidman's) engagement party, tells her that he's her dead husband and proves to possess information that only the deceased could have known.
Three opening fragments establish the interpretive work required of the audience:
A voice-over in which an unidentified speaker announces that, despite being a firm believer in the material world, were his wife to die and then, ten years later, a bird were to alight by him and say she was Anna, he'd be forced to believe her; a black-clad man jogging through a snow-covered Central Park, entering a dark tunnel and collapsing, dead; and a baby being born.
Unfortunately what we get after close on 90 minutes of quality build-up – a controlled mise-en-scene that emphasises the unease in even the most mundane of occurrences and showcases Glazer's definite talent with actors, already established by Sexy Beast , even if one feels that Helen Hunt, Anne Heche and Lauren Bacall are somewhat underused in what is essentially Kidman's film – is a convenient eleventh hour resolution that provides a sort-of-rational explanation and thereby cheats the spectator who has bought into the film's game, whether by accepting the opening birth and death as connected events – a reminder that montage etymologically implies assemblage; "making things up" – or reading intertextual allusions to Rosemary's Baby in Anna's sprawling Manhattan apartment and gamine hairdo.
Thus, the film emerges as neither fantastique nor horror – too weird and declasse respectively – but as disappointing mundane psychological drama – more serious and sophisticated as far as Hollywood is concerned – only vestigially worthwhile for the boldness inherent in the developing relationship between the boy – on this showing Bright could well be the next Elijah Wood Jr or Haley Joel Osment – and 35-year-old woman with its inevitable tightrope walking along the fine line between amour fou and prurient/borderline paedophiliac interest when the mismatched couple talk about "it" or he strips off to joins her in the bath.
Worryingly Glazer's next project is a remake of the Japanese horror Kaos , precisely the sort of project that is likely to require a no-nonsense, unashamed genre sensibility.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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