Before Under the Skin, there was Birth.
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| Related article: Under the Skin Reviewed |
Almost immediately upon release, the
film sparked controversy and was widely misunderstood as some kind of love
letter to pedophilia. Sadly, the film was
overlooked and a mainstream home video release also failed to latch onto an
audience. With time and tide, however, a
cult following began and with it, further anticipation for whatever its
writer-director Jonathan Glazer was going to do next, if anything. Much like Under
the Skin, stylistic comparisons were made to Kubrick for its tracking
shots, its cold sterility, its fearlessness in seeing its ideas through to
their logical end, and for opening far more doors than it manages to close in
its short running time. For Glazer,
revealing the answer is only half as interesting as creating a puzzle for an
audience to solve.
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| "Mommy, let me smell your breath! Have you been drinking?!!!" |
Nicole Kidman, simply put, is
magnificent here. In the film’s most
famous scene (used for the film’s poster), she attends a grand opera with her
fiancée around the time she begins to believe in the boy’s story. The camera slowly zooms in on her face as a
myriad of emotions silently express themselves as her eyes swell with tears,
the thundering opera only accentuating the inner feelings she is
experiencing. It’s a moment both
shockingly pure and completely polar for many wondering why the camera lingers
on her subtly transforming expression for so long. Equally strong is Cameron Bright, fresh off
the demon-child movie Godsend. Though Bright would have a brief stint of
playing creepy kids with far more intelligence than his adult counterparts,
he’s utterly fearless here and much like the character, has a keener
understanding of the situation than you would like to think. And there’s Danny Huston as the fiancée who
at first tries to appease the strange boy before turning on him as he angrily
watches Anna drift away from him.
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| "Do YOU know how much this suit cost?""" |
Though Glazer had already
established himself firmly in the film world with his gangster drama Sexy Beast and a plethora of exquisitely
directed music videos, it’s Birth which
cemented his unique, confident style and announced a director years ahead of
his viewers. With its brooding, dimly
lit, high-contrast cinematography by the late Harris Savides and its ethereal
score by Alexandre Desplat (still his finest score in my opinion), Birth is a haunting ode to timeless
love, grief, and closure, while also pondering notions of immortality and
rebirth. It’s a shame with all the
discussion surrounding his latest effort, Under
the Skin, few viewers know about or have had the pleasure of seeing his
very first masterpiece.
-Andrew Kotwicki