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| A FAIRY TALE OF
NEW YORK
ABOUT A BOY
Nicole Kidman plays Anna, who comes to believe that 10-year-old Sean is
the reincarnation of her late husband.
birth
JONATHAN GLAZER’S NEW FILM BIRTH IS ABOUT WHAT
HAPPENS WHEN THE IMPOSSIBLE BECOMES REAL. HAL HAYES REPORTS ON A MOVIE WHICH
HAS BEEN
CONTROVERSIAL FROM THE MOMENT IT WAS CONCEIVED, AND WHICH SEES NICOLE KIDMAN ADD ANOTHER STRIKING
CHARACTER TO HER RECENT
ROSTER OF ROLES.
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British director Jonathan Glazer, his new film, Birth, starring Nicole Kidman and Lauren Bacall, has always been something of a fairytale - and not just because he has managed to get two leading actresses from two different generations together in one movie.
No, what Glazer really means is that both the theme and the setting of the film - which tells the simultaneously magical and unsettling story of Anna (Kidman), a young widow just coming out of a decade of mourning, who is confronted with a 10-year-old boy (Cameron Bright) who claims to be the reincarnation of her late husband - belong in a world where normal rules and genre conventions do not apply.
For Kidman, whose performance in the movie is as intense as her appearance is different from other award-winning and nominated roles like those in Cold Mountain, The Hours, The Others and Moulin Rouge, it was an equally memorable experience. “It’s a deeply personal movie for me,” she says. “And I’m very happy to have formed the working relationship and friendship with Jonathan, and to have been a part of his vision. It’s been such an honour. To be in the position to say, ‘Gosh, I can go and explore the psyche of this woman and help breath life into her’ – that’s where I feel incredibly fortunate.”
Despite the subject matter, the director was determined not to make Birth ‘spooky’. “We didn’t want to write a film about the paranormal,” says Glazer, who teamed up with the legendary French writer Jean-Claude Carričre, author of Buńuel’s Belle de jour, to create the screenplay. “We didn’t want to set it in a place where this kind of story was part of the cultural philosophy or religion. We liked the idea of setting it in a metropolis where there’s a certain anonymity.
“We also talked about the idea of a kingdom and the idea of the boy coming into a court - a place where there would be very definite lines between the different worlds the boy and the woman occupied.”
This last idea clicked into place when Glazer and his team decided on a huge apartment on the Upper East Side, where Anna lives with her mother, Eleanor (Bacall), as the film’s initial setting. Just across the street is Central Park, from where the boy comes, as though from of one of those enchanted forests that are the stuff of fairytales.
Such juxtapositions have always been important to Glazer: in his last film, Sexy Beast, the house was a similar outpost, but this time located in a kind of desert, from whose barren hillside a great rock crashes down, plunging into the gleaming swimming pool. It says nothing is safe; the term ‘safe as houses’ simply does not apply.
So into the overheated, over-furnished world of Anna and her mother comes this strange little boy from an altogether different world (actually the working-class Brooklyn district of Greenpoint), to tell Anna that he is the reincarnation of her dead husband, Sean. He seems to know things that only her husband would have known, and he is dead set on preventing Anna from marrying the kindly Joseph (Danny Huston), who has been patiently courting her for years.
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