Tag: birth

Birth

Posted on by victorfraga

Yoo Jae-yi (Han Hae-in) is a young and promising writer. Her first published novel is a best-seller, and her editor (Choi Hee-jin) strongly encourages her to continue writing. She is in a relationship with the handsome and loving Kang Shin-chul (Kim Geon-woo), an English teacher eyeing a directorial position in the private school where he teaches. Yoo has a restless mind, and finds comfort in writing fiction. She is indifferent success. She only cares about the quality of her books, in an obsessive behaviour pattern familiar to many creative professionals. She rejects marriage Far more significantly, she believes that motherhood would have a destructive impact on her ability to write.

Yoo Ji-young’s second feature film touches on the often overlooked fact that not all women wish to be mothers, and that pregnancy can be an excruciating, extremely undesirable experience. Yoo and Kim are caught entirely by surprise by the unwanted child, unaware that contraception is never 100% guaranteed. The gynaecologist is delighted to announce the news to our shellshocked protagonist and her husband; she replies quiet and incredulous “excuse me”. Abortion is legal in Korea, and Yoo is below the 14-week threshold, however her frail body (she has thin uterine walls and anaemia) prevents doctor from carrying out the procedure (which could lead to her death or paralysis). She is forced to forge ahead with the pregnancy, despite her sheer repulsion of the unborn child.

Kim eventually grows accustomed to the idea of parenthood. Yoo – the person who has to bear the physical weight of the gestation – never shares his sentiment. Her strange behaviour oscillates between deafening silence and faint whimpering. He listens to the baby kicking, while the tragic mother-to-be describes the sensation of having an “alien” inside her. She has no interest in the gender of the child.

It gets worse. The social pressures have a devastating impact on the introspective intellectual. Friends and family repeatedly offer her advice and interfere with her diet. A woman asks: “is it ok to get stressed while pregnant?”, while another one questions: “is it ok for pregnant women to attend funerals?”, both without realising the absurdity and the reserse impact of their clumsy interrogation. In what’s perhaps the film’s most significant scene, Yoo breaks down in tears of joy when her editor discusses her wellbeing and her future, instead of focussing solely on the unborn baby. Yoo’s performance is very convincing as a woman no longer comfortable in her own body.

Yoo decides to carry on writing and drinking alcohol during pregnancy, in an attempt to retain her sanity. She finds a venting outlet in writing about her ordeal. An interviewer asks her during a press conference what her new book is about. She replies: “It’s about a woman who does not want to be a mother”, before explaining that she’s “halfway through it”. Her comment refers to both the book and the pregnancy, demonstrating that there is an inexorable connection between her personal experience and her writing. Such connection may also exist between the filmmaker and her movie. The fact that the name of the director and of the protagonist are almost identical suggests an autobiographic element.

This 155-minute drama is a profound character study of a woman having a mental breakdown. The first two hours are reflexive and engaging, with a simple and realistic camerawork and no music score (heightening the moments of awkward silence and the constantly brewing tension). Regrettably, the director inserts too many topics in the final half an hour of the movie, when Kim’s personal and professional life at work spirals out of control. The story slips into gratuitous misery fest territory, with countless pregnant pauses (pun intended) that neither create a sense of suspense nor add anything valuable to the story. The ending is entirely redundant. Yoo Ji-young is a brave and talented filmmaker. She could have terminated her film a little more prematurely. Some things are better when they are not carried to full term.

Birth is in the Official Selection of the 41st Turin International Film Festival.

The Chambermaid (Sluzka)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Part British television drama Upstairs Downstairs, part illicit lesbian romance, this film undercuts fears of stodgy, conservative product to deliver instead a story full of fearless performances which, for all its faults, constantly disturbs and surprises. The action takes place in Prague before and during the time of World War I.

he late 19th century, a small town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anka (Dana Droppová) is the bastard child of Eva. The pair are close until in Anka’s teenage years, her mother marries a man with three children who promptly finds a position for Anka to get her out of the way. Thus, the girl commences work as a chambermaid in a wealthy German household in Prague where she’s told to say Yes Milord and Yes Milady whenever anything’s asked of her by the master and mistress of the house.

She arrives when there’s a big social gathering going on, and is asked by Milady (Zuzana Mauréry) if she can sing. This leads to a her confident rendition of a Slavic folk song. You might think this is going to develop into a narrative thread but it doesn’t, an indication of the film’s major weakness: it constantly throws in new ideas some of which then don’t go anywhere, and there are even new ideas coming up in the final reel, for instance that Milord (Karel Dobrý) has been involved with various dodgy dealings (arms manufacture and sales, perhaps?) for which the incriminating paperwork needs to be burned when there has been no hint of this up to that point.

Likewise, she’s warned that the daughter Resi (Radka Caldová) can be difficult, but nothing quite prepares you for a sequence where Resi, on the pretext of not being able to find a brooch, orders Anka to strip off to prove she hasn’t stolen it. This seems to be primarily about humiliating the servants rather than any peculiar sexual fetish, and bears no relationship to their subsequent friendship and lesbian relationship either.

Other ideas thrown up by the narrative ARE however taken up to emerge as major story threads, and there are quite a few of them. Milord is partial to violently slapping those to whom he objects, which sometimes includes his wife should she dare to offer her opinion. As she later explains to her daughter when talking about marriage, you soon learn to keep quiet after you’ve been slapped a few times.

Milord is also partial to seeking temptations of the flesh elsewhere, something one of the older, more established maids Lisa (Vica Kerekes) is keen to exploit, working her was up to becoming his mistress with a house that he’ll pay for. The gardener is upfront about messing around with any woman who will let him, so when Resi is on the verge of marrying Gustav (Cyril Dobrý from All Quiet On The Western Front, Edward Berger, 2022)), she sends Anka to sleep with the gardener to obtain a full report. Anka’s verdict is, bearable and over quickly, but when she attempts to demonstrate this to Resi, it lasts longer, is far more satisfying and develops into a long-running relationship. So much so, that after Resi has birthed her first daughter, Anka becomes the child’s nursemaid until Milady bans her from that position after discovering Anka and Resi sharing a full bathtub together.

The cook Kristina (Anna Geislerová) is branded an old maid by Lisa, although she also possesses midwifery and abortionist skills which makes you wonder what happened to her in her past. Nevertheless, a memorable scene or Resi giving birth in which there’s a real possibility she might die is brilliantly conveyed in a lengthy reaction shot of Anka’s face. A later sequence has Kristina diagnose Lisa as pregnant and perform an abortion, with Anka required to drop a foetus-sized package of one of the city’s bridges into the water just as throughout the film she also empties chamber pots into street drains under the admonition, our employers must be allowed to think their shit smells sweeter than ours.

Resi, meanwhile, comes to despise her husband. He is sheltered and foolish enough to be delighted to get called up for active service in WW1, and Resi is so keen for him not to come back that Anka elicits details of how to curse somebody from Kristina so that Anka and Resi can perform a makeshift witchcraft ritual (basically, walking round a room stark naked with a broomstick between her legs) to curse him. He comes back from the war wounded, an embittered figure who has lost one leg, one eye and, perhaps more significantly, whatever self-dignity he previously possessed.

Anka is religious enough to pray nightly for her mother and the Emperor, so clearly her Christianity (probably Catholic or Orthodox) is of the state- and establishment-bolstering variety. It’s difficult to see what other impact it has on her life.

For all its veering around all over the place narrative-wise, this proves an engrossing two hours, far more so than you might reasonably expect.

The Chambermaid premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

A Deal With The Universe

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The filmmaker asks his mum what his name is. “It’s J”, she replies. “J for what?”, he asks. “J for Jason”, she says sheepishly like a child to a teacher, knowing she should have got the answer right first time.

Despite its momentous title, this is quite a low key affair. There’s an argument that suggests that home movies are the purest form of cinema, bereft as they are of the industrial trappings of sophisticated moving image making. Conversely, in recent years, increasingly sophisticated technology for the consumer market has meant that many people can make and indeed edit films about their own lives as personal mementos. Whether such films should be turned into professional features is a whole other question.

This film started life as a personal diary to record a pregnancy and a couple’s impending parenthood. With a twist. Tracey and Jason had been together for some time, a woman and a trans man, when they learned that Tracey couldn’t have kids.

Jason had been taking testosterone since 2000 in order to transition from female to male. He halted the process in order to fertilise a human egg in his own body then transfer it to Tracey’s womb. At least, that was the plan. It didn’t work out that way, though; she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy. Then Jason realised his own body could carry the child through to its birth. However, try as he might, Jason couldn’t get pregnant over numerous attempts. Then he had a miscarriage. Finally, after more than 30 attempts, the pregnancy took.

Although some big moving image taboos are being broken, to the film’s credit it doesn’t feel like that when you’re watching. We’re not used to seeing women post-mastectomy or men in the process of gender transition on a movie screen. Both Tracey and Jason are very relaxed in front of the camera. Tracey shows off her chest both before (two breasts) and after (one breast and a scar) surgery. Jason, when he finally gets pregnant, frolics underwater in the local swimming pool. I certainly can’t recall another documentary where a man is shown getting pregnant.

Anyone who’s ever tried to have kids successfully or otherwise knows it’s a journey fraught with all manner of possible setbacks and disasters. For some couples, everything goes right first time; for others, not so much. This more universal aspect of the subject matter may help open the film up to a wider audience. That’s also true of the mastectomy material which is very well handled.

The couple look like very ordinary people and you can’t but help feel for them in their plight. Jason is motivated to show a trans person in the context of a stable, loving relationship as not vastly different from the his fellow human beings, a goal he accomplishes admirably.

However, while its subject matter is compelling and its autobiographical human subjects congenial enough, the origins of the project and its filmic form let it down. Whatever merits the home movie format possesses ultimately become the film’s weakness. It just doesn’t quite know how to break out of its home movie roots.

The perfunctory editing into a readily digestible narrative frequently allows what should be a thoroughly compelling story to slide into the merely banal. Perhaps stretching the material into a feature at just under 90 minutes was a mistake: parts of it feel way too thin. The best bits are impressive enough but too much padding elsewhere lets the whole thing down.

A Deal With The Universe is out in the UK on Friday, April 12th, and on VoD the following Monday! Watch the film trailer below: