Birth (2004)

Jonathan Glazer followed Sexy Beast with something quieter and stranger: a reincarnation mystery set among wealthy Manhattanites in winter, in which a ten-year-old boy informs a grieving widow that he is her dead husband returned. The screenplay, worked over through twenty-one drafts with Milo Addica and Jean-Claude Carrière, refuses the ghost story it could have been. There are no explanations, no moral ledger, no closing argument. Glazer has said he does not believe in reincarnation and was chasing the idea of eternal love instead. The result is a chamber piece that drifts through engagement parties, opera houses, and Central Park like a rumor.

Nicole Kidman gives Anna a clipped, unglamorous grief, and the film's power rests almost entirely on her willingness to play small. The supporting cast (Bacall, Huston, Heche, Stormare) orbits her with appropriate unease. The notorious bath scene and the kiss on the lips generated a scandal at Venice, where the press screening was met with boos. Two decades on, the film has been reassessed as a masterpiece by some and remains ridiculous to others. Both camps are correct.

The film does offer a woman's interiority: her mourning, her desire, her willingness to abandon a decent fiancé for a child who may be a ghost or a thief. That is a feminine subject, and the film treats it with seriousness. It is not, however, a thesis. There is no program here, no instruction, no audience to be improved. Race, class, sexuality, the climate, the body politic: none of it appears, and none of it is missed. A wealthy widow's private anguish is simply the whole weather of the picture. We are left with a strange, sad, unfashionable object, and a quiet admiration for a director who declined to tell us what it meant.