Birth

On the evidence of “Birth”, the British director Jonathan Glazer is one of cinema’s great stylists. Synthesizing image and music, and employing a gliding, precisely tracking camera, subtly reframing for emphasis, and exactly calibrating the ambience of settings and décor, Glazer’s 2004 film develops a portentous mood of elegant, hopeless obsession. Glazer is famous director of beer commercials and similar advertisements in his native England and, I suppose, it is no surprise that he wields camera and lighting with such remarkable aplomb. But, as with his commercial work, the question that “Birth” raises is whether his rather slight subject manner is worthy of such operatic splendor. In my view, “Birth” is strange enough, and sufficiently mysterious and beautiful, to justify Glazer’s icy Kubrick-influenced exactitude and, of course, we must recall that similar questions were raised about Kubrick’s later films as well -- does the enigmatic parable shown in “Eyes Wide Shut” really justify the glacial magnificence of the movie’s camerawork, costumes, and locations? The opening five or six minutes of “Birth” demonstrate that we are in the hands of master film-maker. We hear a voice-over, something about materialism and death, and, then, the camera tracks a man jogging through an icy, rocky landscape; the shot goes on and on and, then, suddenly, a pack of dogs emerges from the underbrush and trot across the man’s path, a curious detail that has nothing to do with the film, but which establishes a sense of unmediated reality at the heart of a highly stylized, even contrived, tracking shot. The jogger enters a tunnel and falls to the ground. We realize, perhaps, with a shock that this oddly desolate landscape is New York’s Central Park. The camera reframes the opening of the tunnel to suggest an oval birth-canal and, then, we see a newborn infant underwater at first, but, then, gently lifted into the light. All of this is staged to music that sounds something like a percussive version of Mahler. After this overture, we learn that a wealthy man, played by Danny Huston intends to marry Anna, Nicole Kidman in a performance that is both radiant and mournful. Anna is the widow of the man who we have seen collapsing in the tunnel in Central Park and, now, ten years has passed. At the birthday of Anna’s mother (Lauren Bacall), a little boy enters the party, confronts the assembled guests and claims that he is Sean, Anna’s dead husband, somehow reincarnated. The boy has an eerie flat affect and a broad, half-ugly face and he is so convinced that he is Anna’s husband that he claims to love her. The child has remarkably intimate information about Anna, knows her secrets and her family history, and, in one remarkable, scene, even, offers to make love to her. Gradually, Anna becomes obsessed with the boy and plans to flee with him. Her fiancée, needless to say is non-plussed, and driven to fury by his ten-year-old rival, attacks the boy at an elegant soiree, shoving a baby grand piano against the child and, then, beating him -- all to the embarrassed horror of the assembled guests and the musicians who were playing Lohengrin’s Wedding March when the affray erupted. As is often the case with films of this kind, the solution to the mystery is disappointing. But the uncanny effect of the strange child doesn’t really dissipate when the riddle is solved and, at the end of the movie, when Anna begs for the forgiveness of her smug, unimaginative fiance, and, then, marries him, we sense that she has not forgotten Sean, that she still loves him, and that the obsessive bond that links her to the boy, and through him to the ghost of her dead husband, will haunt her forever. The boy, although apparently disturbed and deluded, genuinely loves Anna and there is a scene in which the child nobly refuses to tell her how he has learned her secrets that is extremely moving -- we know what the boy’s enigmatic remarks mean, but Anna can’t decipher his statement: “I can’t be Sean because I love you.” Unlike some directors famous for their commercial work (for instance Ridley Scott), Jonathan Glazer is a tactful and excellent director of actors and respects their performances. He doesn’t cut unnecessarily and uses close-ups judiciously, preferring to frame stately tableaux of his wealthy, rather pretentious characters in their gorgeously appointed abodes. Two contrasting scenes show Glazer’s skill: in one scene, Nicole Kidman’s character stutters and struggles to express her conflicting feelings about Sean’s reincarnation as a rather grubby little boy -- she rolls her eyes, makes odd grimaces, and demonstrates an extraordinary range of expression: she seems to laugh at herself and her credulity, while, at the same time, her lips and eyes tremble on the verge of tears. There is a peculiar little motion she makes, brushing at her eyes, that is particularly indelible. It’s an extraordinary virtuosic set-piece, all performed in a single long take. No less astounding is a ninety-second shot in which the camera scrutinizes Kidman’s face while we hear the agitated notes of Wagner’s overture to “Die Walkuere” -- in this scene, the actress does nothing at all, but the viewer hears the music, considers the context, and, then, imputes meaning to Ms. Kidman’s expressionless features. The great critic, David Thomson, probably our best writer on film today, claims that “Birth” is a lost masterpiece, a great work that almost no one has seen. Whether this assertion is true is debatable. But, certainly, “Birth” is compelling, brilliantly acted -- the audience delights in seeing these smug, Wasp plutocrats confronting an ineffable mystery -- and a remarkable showcase for Glazer’s film technique.