scifi

Womb (Director: Benedek Fliegauf): I love films which take a sci­ence fic­tion premise or set­ting and then show us real char­ac­ters reacting to that premise or set­ting. Womb prom­ised to be an inter­esting explor­a­tion of some of the more del­icate eth­ical issues around the issue of human cloning, and it didn’t hurt that it fea­tured the lovely Eva Green.

We first meet Rebecca and Tommy as chil­dren. Rebecca is staying with her grand­father who lives in a beach­front house on a remote-looking island. She meets Tommy on the beach one day and they bond instantly. What’s more, they’re just at that age where they’re begin­ning to feel romantic attrac­tion, and it seems that there is a very primal force drawing them together. But then Rebecca leaves to live with her mother who’s taken a job in Japan, and the two don’t even get to say a proper goodbye. Fast for­ward 12 years, and now the adult Rebecca returns to the island looking for Tommy. When she finds him, the mutual attrac­tion is still there and soon they’re a couple. But it seems that within only a few days, tragedy strikes when Tommy is killed by a car. Here’s where the sci-fi kicks in. Against his par­ents’ wishes, Rebecca has her­self impreg­nated with some of Tommy’s genetic material and nine months later gives birth to his clone. As she raises this child alone, the creep­i­ness gradu­ally increases until 20 years later, when it sud­denly goes off the charts.

This intriguing premise is sadly mis­handled by Hungarian-born Fliegauf, who chose to work in English, not his first lan­guage. As a result, the script is clumsy, even though there is barely enough dia­logue to begin with. When Tommy 2 learns the truth about his ori­gins, he’s left to exclaim, “Why did you do it? Why did you do this thing?” There are long stretches of silence in the film, and there is not a single normal con­ver­sa­tion between any of the char­ac­ters. Nor do we really know what’s going on inside any of their heads. Eva Green’s blazing eyes and pre-Raphaelite beauty do not equal a char­acter. The film is all mood, a col­lec­tion of atmo­spheric shots but not a real story. Rebecca’s obses­sion with recon­necting with her true love just isn’t that inter­esting when it takes 30 years to resolve. Characters living in isol­a­tion in a beach house with no dis­cern­ible friends, family or live­li­hoods just make the story feel more arti­fi­cial. To make mat­ters worse, I found the grown-up Tommy insuf­fer­able. He’s prac­tic­ally aut­istic; cer­tainly childish and a bit prim­itive. When he returns as a clone, he’s still obnox­ious. I couldn’t see the coldly intel­lec­tual Rebecca having any attrac­tion to this farm­hand. His beha­viour becomes even worse when he gets a girl­friend and “mom” with­draws into depres­sion. Rebecca’s way of telling him the truth is both ana­chron­istic and cow­ardly. She gives him Tommy 1’s 20-year-old laptop with pic­tures of Tommy 1 with his (real) par­ents and video of him­self at polit­ical protests. I snickered when he was able to get the old machine up and run­ning instantly and nav­igate through the files.

Although Fliegauf does suc­ceed in thor­oughly grossing out the audi­ence by the end, I still didn’t care about the char­ac­ters. Though the rela­tion­ship isn’t tech­nic­ally incest, it seems even worse, since Rebecca has been cul­tiv­ating this child for so long only to con­sum­mate a sexual rela­tion­ship with him. It’s a shame that this rather inter­esting idea failed so spec­tac­u­larly in the exe­cu­tion. The film never con­vinces us that Tommy and Rebecca were really much of a couple to begin with, and we never learn much about either of them as indi­viduals either. There is no real set­ting; the almost-abandoned beach feels as arti­fi­cial as if the two of them are on the moon. Tommy’s par­ents con­veni­ently dis­ap­pear and when his mother reappears 20 years later, she leaves without saying a word. Rebecca comes across as cold and silent, Tommy as stunted and unlike­able. There is the germ of a good film here. Maybe we could clone that and try again.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Benedek Fliegauf from after the screening.

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Duration: 19:34

(5/10)

Tagged as: #tiff10, cloning, germany, scifi

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