Birth - A Requiem in Three Acts

I saw Birth in 2005 when it finally opened in May. I came out of the cinema with a strange feeling washing over me. I wasn't entirely sure what it was I was feeling, but I liked it. Nay, I loved it. At the time I said to my friend "I really liked it." Really. I had to really accentuate that word because, much like the character of "Sean" in the film, the film bewitched me. It put me under a magical spell and never let go. From those opening frames of a man running through Central Park as Alexandre Desplat's music plays over the top, I was hooked. Mesmerised. Dazzled. Whatever you look up a thesaurus and find alongside those words, that's what I was. As I said, I couldn't explain it. I still can't for the most part. But I'll try.


I said up there that I was "bewitched". I think that's a good word to describe the film. Bewitching. It really does cast a spell on the viewer if you're willing. You really have to be willing in order to fully accept director Jonathan Grazer's sophomore film. You don't need to suspend belief - like you're watching a science-fiction movie - that a person could be reincarnated. You need to be able to accept that a perfectly normal put-together woman such as Anna (played by Nicole Kidman) could suspend belief. And the film conveys her inner and outer turmoil perfectly. Nicole Kidman has the steely rock hard form of Anna down pat. She's still grieving (10 years after the death of her husband) and she seems slightly at odds with her decision to remarry (this time to Joseph, played by Danny Huston) so when a boy with the same name as her ex husband, who's the correct age and who has an uncanny ability to expel information about "himself" and Anna, it seems downright acceptable that this could really be her dead husband. But again, it's not whether you, the viewer, believe "Sean" is really Sean. It's if you believe Anna really believes it. And, in all honesty, I really did.


They key scene, which I'm sure you're all aware of if you have seen the film, is a scene at the Opera. After a confrontation with the boy Sean's father, Anna and Joseph arrive late to the Opera. They take their seats and sit down. What happens next is crucial and will prove to be one of the crowning achievements of Nicole Kidman's career. In a single two minute take we watch Kidman perform one of acting's hardest things: an internal monologue. Without one single word in the scene, Kidman's acting really does convince us that she is convinced the boy is her dead husband reincarnated. Her eyes, her flaring nostrils, the slightly twitch of the head. It's superb acting. Earlier this year I said I though Kidman's performance in Lars Von Trier's Dogville was her best, but as my brain goes towards the film more and more, so too does my belief that Birth is actually her number one performance. Her voice throughout barely goes above a whisper, but you learn so much about Anna. She wants to believe what's happening. She does believe it eventually. She then must come to the realisations and ramifications that are born out of the situation. And Kidman has zero false moments. You believe every second.


Elsewhere, there is one other performance that is also truly excellent. Anne Heche is an actress that I geniunely like, but who rarely finds work that truly works with her overtly odd sense of being. Her role as Clara is one that I wasn't originally fond of to any spectacular degree, but just like the film itself, it continues to show itself with each subsequent viewing (which, may I add, for me the number is approaching somewhere around 15). I now truly believe it's one of the decade's great supporting turns. She shows up briefly, but with only a few scenes she single handedly tells us everything we need to know. She doesn't appear to be anything more than a second-hand role that the producers thought they could get a kick out of seeing a formerly popular actress in. But then in one fell-swoop she threatens to steal the movie right out from under Kidman, just as her character pulls the rug out of the character of the boy Sean. Just listen to the way she speaks to Sean. "See how dirty my hands are?" Her confrontation with Sean and the schoolbag is phenomenal. Of course, not giving Cameron Bright his due is criminal. He works hard as Sean to make Anna believe. Lauren Bacall is typically matriachal as Anna's mother. Danny Huston fits like a glove. And character actors such as Peter Stormare, Cara Seymour, Alriss Howard, Alison Elliot, Zoe Caldwell and Ted Levine add bonus support.


Technically, the film is stunning. Musical scores this perfect are extremely rare, but Alexandre Desplat (who is garnering a long list of exquisite scores) does it masterfully. The score is so perfectly in tune to the movie. The (here's that word again) bewitching almost fairy-tale spriteness of it all just washes over you. At the very start "Prologue" with it's horns and flutes introduces the themes that you hear throughout. Just bliss. Harris Savides' cinematography is equally beautifully grounded in the real world as it is magically other-worldy. And the contemporary costume design and art direction (by John A Dunn and Jonathan Arkin respectively) feels just right with it's mixing of Upper Class Central Park West with Lower Class residential. Editing by Sam Sneade and Claus Wehlisch is tight and precise - the film is only 100 minutes long. The feel of New York City just works so completely.


Birth is a film that I find myself constantly thinking about, over a year since I saw it. The slightest trigger can set it off. When I was in New York City earlier this year it was a big trigger - Central Park. The place that features so prominantly throughout the film (sort of as a juxtaposition. The crazy New York reincarnation story versus nature). Other times I may be listening to my iPod and on comes Alexandre Desplat's sublime original score. Whenever I think of it my mind races. I try to remember all the scenes, down to the dialogue and character movements. There are so many memorable scenes in this movie. From the Opera sequence, to Clara's confrontation, to the opening scene in Central Park, to the bathroom sequence, to the perplexing and thought-provoking ending. What does that finale mean. I think there are several interpretations - Perhaps when the boy Sean says they will meet in the "next life" he commits suicide and Anna's sudden change of mood at her wedding is an indication that she felt it as it was happening as if was her husband all over again. That's the far out theory that I like to believe, because it has so many repurcussions. The film continues to climb higher and higher on my personal canon of films each new time I watch it.

The movie haunts me as a viewer, much like Anna's dead husband haunts her as a woman. He gets in her brain and so when something even remotely linked to him comes along, she wants to grab ahold and go for the ride, because the ride was oh so sweet.


Lastly, for a truly oddly spiritually connected twosome, watch Birth side-by-side with Todd Haynes' Safe. It's sort of scary how similar they are in all honesty. Not in themes or any of that, but in tone, talent and pure bewitchingly other-worldly filmmaking.