Birth (2004)

Everyone talks about two bits in Birth  – one, Nicole Kidman goes to the opera, and the camera holds in a close-up on her face for two long minutes, in an obvious Dreyer homage. Two, Kidman takes a bath with a ten-year-old boy and the mood is tenser and less innocent than ideally one would like it to be given the bounds of propriety. Will bath-time become paedo sexy-time? A kid-man for a Kidman. 

Now I know what you’re going to say – “I’m giving this one a wide berth!” Well, you know what, just grow up a bit please, this is a serious film and we’re not going to dwell on those scenes anyway. Everything to say about them has been said, not that there's loads to say. In fact, hundreds of thousands of words of deep musings about this film are already available, but I think mine will show - pregnant pause - more natal care. 

The design of Birth is perfectly clean and uncluttered. A precocious child declares that he’s the reincarnation of an upper-class Manhattan woman’s dead husband and she increasingly entertains the idea, despite the havoc it causes to her engagement and bourgeois existence, because he knows things that only her husband could have known. That's less a plot than a notion but it is a plot in this sense - we, but not the characters, know what’s really going on. 

We’re never invited to buy into the reincarnation idea, only to deplore the exploitation of a psychologically susceptible victim or perhaps to watch scientifically the effect on a life apparently sealed off from disaster by wealth. In pointedly positioning a scene near the film’s beginning, where we see the boy looking in the direction of where the husband’s letters were buried, the director Jonathan Glazer debunks the rest of the film’s surface plot. Since there’s pretty obviously only one inference we can draw once the boy shows up and shows off his apparently miraculous knowledge, everything we watch subsequently has already been implicitly explained to us with that one shot of the boy’s gaze on a patch of ground.

By telegraphing the real reason behind the boy’s spooky insights, the film disowns any attempt to make it a weird supernatural (or religious) mystery and instead makes you itch for the characters to catch up. So while Kidman’s character struggles with the question of proof, even the question of how you can prove if someone loves you, we know in advance that the search is a dead end. The journey to get there is so cinematic, though, with the austerity of classicism – beginning with the fantastic opening tracking shot of a man jogging as the credits play and the eerie soft music tinkles, and the later matching shots of the bridge underpass where he dies. All through, the choices are exquisite to watch, the reflections of a dead tree on a window commenting on the character looking through it, great editing that cuts from the camera moving in on one character to another character to define their connections.

Predictably a film this bleak and oblique, this Kubrickishly solemn (congenital traits), has attracted a lot of long essays poring over its details for clues with hermeneutic scrutiny. I confess, abashed and rueful, to my own temptation to lay it out as an allegory of bourgeois ideology, where the ending note of desolation represents the shattering epiphany of the unjustifiable continuation and inevitable overthrow of the ruling class, which is why the ultimate bourgeois ceremony, a wedding, is the site of the final crisis. That’s there, but it's not quite the film’s centre of gravity, which is much more universal and not necessarily flabbily so. 

The real pay-off to it all is simply the last scene. Over a voice-over of the boy reading a goodbye letter, Anna leaves her wedding party in increasing distress. The salient line from that letter is “They say the good thing is nothing happened.” Some people, bizarrely, read the ending as Anna being upset by the letter because he says he won’t see her again and she’s going to miss him. And some people have poked holes to keep open the idea that the boy really is reincarnated. Those are both misjudged takes, as are the mystical philosophy-lectures and poetic metaphor-spottings that surround talk about Glazer's intentions, and as even a class-based analysis would be, too - all flinch from the harshness of what we're seeing. 

Glazer and the cast generally just say it's a film about love, but as it's not about love for the boy or the second husband, that’s a rather coy frame. The boy as a person recedes into irrelevance for her and for us – all that counts is what he has wrought. The defining pain at the centre of her life has been brutally reopened, ripped open, by a stupid kid, and while he blithely wanders off like "nothing happened", she's left with her unfinished grief to cope with all over again, maybe with her new husband, maybe ultimately alone, maybe forever. The title stands for its opposite and the wreckage it leaves for the living and the absurdities and denials we'll countenance just to deflect it. What Birth is about, despite its aloof air, is not really ambiguous – it’s about those last two wordless minutes, on the beach, by the water's edge, under a stark sky. 

Apparently there was going to be a sequel but it was aborted.