Birth (2004)

Absolutely Fantastic

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I don't think this movie was brilliant or anyway above average but it is far from being a mediocre movie, it is very thought provoking indeed. It is a movie about love and how loving someone so much can be painful and derange someone. Many people will take long or never overcome a loss of a beloved one. The idea of a naked kid in a bath tub with a grown up woman is only possible for those people who unfortunately either did not get it or can't have their obtuse minds thinking in the context.The delusional situation of the woman led her to another reality and there was anything sexual in that scene. It was erotic but society tends to be judgmental and they see what they want to see. People still confuse nudity with being naked in a sexual situation, which is not. And erotic is not pornographic, it has to involve loving and caring. Someone kissing and deeply in love is erotic. That feeling of your heart pounding when meeting someone, hugging and kissing is deeply erotic while the sexual act per se can be only a physical need if love is out of the picture. This movie is deep and hard to get if you don't look it thinking of the loss she went through.

This is my first time writing a review. Normally, if I am moved to say something about a film that I saw, I would settle for writing in the message boards. "Birth", however, is so horribly underrated that I find myself compelled to at least try and redeem it. I have watched "Birth" so many times that I've lost count. It is a very cunning film (in a good way!), with many symbols and layers that keep revealing themselves the more you watch it. It is superbly written, acted, directed and edited. But most of all it is a very sad story about a young and fragile woman who is first hurt, and almost destroyed (my presumption), by the death of a much loved spouse, only to be wounded again ten years later by the surfacing of the truth about her admired dead husband.When I saw the film for the first time I was so consumed by the question of whether or not the boy is a reincarnation of Anna's husband (finding myself both wishing that he was and that he wasn't), that I completely forgot the first time that Sean the boy appears, and that there was some very peculiar behavior of Claire's, and also a package that she buries in the park. As I wrote above, I have since watched the film many many more times. It is always painful to watch Anna spiral out of control after finally, and barely, managing to get her life back on track. Since Sean the boy is nothing like Sean the adult, it is clear that the second love affair is happening entirely inside Anna's head, which is most obvious in the scene where she kisses Sean the boy while her eyes (and, of course, her mind's eyes) are seeing something entirely different. Which, of course, says a lot about love in general, how much we really see or know, how much is our own invention etc. The first times that I've watched the film I've managed to overlook the too obvious blowing of the final candle on the cake by Anna... A recurring element in the film is the word "lie": Laura saying, "from now on we tell the truth - no more lying", and near the end Anna shaking Sean in the bath saying "so you're a little liar, aren't you?!", which stand out after watching the film several times, because it is actually Sean the adult who was the liar. I can't deny that there are holes in the script that I can't fill. Forgive me, but those who think this film is about reincarnation are fools. The film cunningly uses our natural wish to see our dead loved ones again so that the end of the film and the explanation of young Sean's knowledge will come as a bitter blow to us, just as it comes to Anna. And here is the most important yet very slippery moment in the entire film: At Anna's wedding she is taken aside to be photographed on her own, and as she holds her bouquet and tries to smile to the camera a thoughtful expression settles on her face... She doesn't hear the photographer anymore, as understanding finally dawns on her... In the scene where little Sean tells Anna that he is "not Sean, because he loves her" she doesn't understand... understanding comes at that specific moment at the wedding, and it is this intuitive grasping of the truth about her beloved Sean that drives her to try or at least wish to drown herself in the sea. I tried to share my enthusiasm of the film with people who are close to me and, well, "failed". Either they did not see so much in the film as I did, or the pivotal moment at the wedding remained something that only I felt/saw. There is nothing at all in the script or the events in the film that can justify my certainty of that moment's meaning, but I have yet to change my mind about it... And finally, something perhaps not so important but which bothered my for a while until (I think...) I figured it out: In the scene between Claire and young Sean in her apartment, Claire has smooth blond hair that looks completely natural. However, when the scene cuts into the chase into the lobby of Claire's building, her hair looks like a reddish wig. It took me a while to come to the (unsubstantiated, of course) conclusion that this scene was added after the filming was done. It is my guess that either the director himself or his producers thought that there wasn't enough information to make the film understood, and so they added Claire's explanation of how Anna's letters got to her and why. "Birth" is definitely one of my favorite films, and remains a painful pleasure in its perfect imperfection every time I watch it again.

Regardless of what you think of the film itself, "Birth" is almost certainly a fascinating insight on how we, in the West, 'do' tales about reincarnation and death. Lining it up against something from the East, such as 2010 Thai film "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives", reveals an unparalleled distinction in Eastern and Western attitudes towards all manner of items associated with grief, death and rebirth. One would be hard pressed not to classify Birth as a horror film for something like ninety per-cent of its runtime, but for the remaining ten it's something of a character piece pertaining to be about the grieving process and how recovering through such a thing is more of a mammoth task than one would imagine. The film feels that, with the inherent content at the centre of its revolving around the ambiguity as to whether someone has actually come back to life through a ten year old boy, such content needs to play out with horror convention and a real sense of unease – as if this is a happening to be afraid of. Cut to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's aforementioned Thai film and how the people within exhibit indifference; how they react to ghosts, spirits and those of whom are quite clearly once again on Earth after having died such is the cultural and religious attitude.This isn't to say one approach is 'right' and the other 'wrong'; both films are as slow and as burning as each other – it's just that we find the Asian one more-so out of our unfamiliarity. Each of them are, in a sense, thrillers but they are thrillers which come with the hushed atmospheres and the sorts of differing brands of eeriness that only two films from continents as polarised as Europe/America and Asia are. Throughout Birth, there seems to be an on-going Civil War playing out as to whether we view it as a flash-in-the-pan pedophobic American chiller that does well to invoke The Omen and The Shining (complete with early 'bouncing the ball against the blank wall' homage), epitomised in Desplat's score which rages between moody and cheery, or as something exactly that: a joyous piece fascinated by this miracle and by the revelations that reincarnation has hit these people.Jonathan Glazer directs here; an Englishman whose lone previous work was Sexy Beast and of which was a similarly twisting, turning thriller that burnt slowly and took its time in spite of the fact it too was prone to accusations being a knock-off genre film with too many familiarities. Like Sexy Beast, the film opens with a long unbroken take; but the bright and clear sunshine of an Andalucian coast has been traded in for the snowy doldrums of a New York City winter as a jogger goes about his course before collapsing and dying. Ten years pass and we learn he was once married to Nicole Kidman's character, Anna; a woman who has since rediscovered love in Joe (Huston) and is on the cusp of marrying him after a very long time toying with such an idea. Anna is, in spite of her past tragedy, living the good life in her marble imbued New York apartment with a man who loves her a great deal. Her romanticised introduction, wherein a birthday party for her elderly mother is bathed in the sorts of melodramatic pleasures one associates with all truly terrible films were they not on occasion doing it so knowingly, is a deceptive cover masking both the inner turmoil and strife that lingers as a result of the opening death.Out of nowhere, a young boy named Shaun (Bright) who lives on the floor above approaches her and informs her that HE is that dead man and that he has been reincarnated as this young boy in the here and now. What keeps things burning is the film's obligation for the characters to first confront the parents in asking them what's up and there are hushed, suspicious tones where ordinarily there should be spot-quiz investigations which would solve the problem in five minutes. From here a somewhat frightening, even if it doesn't necessarily have any right to be so born out of the earlier points, often highly engaging tale of distrust; disbelief and a lot of level headed characters reacting somewhat accordingly given the film's big payoff in reaction to Shaun's revelation, plays out. There feels as if there ought to be more inherent in how Shaun is quite evidently of a lower 'class' than Anna and her present partner, a rough looking boy whose parents are evidently not as well off as Anna and Joe, but live in the same building anyway. A point is made as to how Anna's first husband seemed to resent religion and disbelieved in reincarnation – is there a cruel irony in bringing him back anyway, and in a worse off position than his one-time wife? Glazer's film is about an American woman burying the nastiness of her past with an 'idyllic' lifestyle that suddenly has a face/foe from the past turn up on her doorstep and offer her revelations/ideas which can only drag her back into the fires of before. This is ultimately the same set up as Sexy Beast, albeit without the ambiguity as to how the confrontation will end: you always sense something has to give in Birth, not so in Sexy Beast. If the 2000 effort was a proposition about a heist, we genuinely sensed it might come second or even third to the primary content. Here, the outlandish proposal IS the primary content, but it doesn't suffer so much that it renders the exercise 'bad' - merely inferior to his last project. Regardless, Birth is a taut thriller that is hard not to enjoy.

I've been hearing for a while now about the praise Nicole Kidman receives in Birth, and so I definitely saw it for her. She was magnificent, one of her very best performances and perhaps her best performance of the 2000s. However, I also found the film to be quiet effective. It has an ominous, wonderfully atmospheric tone and sensitive direction that sort of manages to cast a spell on you (the way Kidman's character perhaps is in the film). I do wish it was left more ambiguous, and there's still quite a few things that don't entirely make sense when you think about the "ending resolution". Still, surprised it got such a cold response from critics.