Showing as part of London Film Festival 2010
Benedek Fliegauf/ Germany/ Hungary/ France 2010/ 107 min
The sudden death of a lover is something very few of us will have to endure, but for those who do the loss can consume, devastate and destroy them. In Benedek Fliegauf’s (Forest, Dealer) latest, and perhaps most conventional, feature childhood sweethearts Thomas (Matt Smith) and Rebecca (Eva Green) meet in adulthood and their brief rekindling of love is shattered by an unexpected accident. Living in an undefined, slightly dystopian, future their exists an ability to create ‘copies’; clones of our deceased. Rebecca embarks on the treatment and soon gives birth to her lover.
With more than a hint of Jean-Claude Carrière’s Birth seeping into the film, Fliegauf’s Womb risks certain unflattering comparisons, even Green’s performance seems to mimic Nicola Kidman’s tortured soul. It’s a story we’ve seen, yet Womb‘s landscape: the harsh German North Sea coast and the continuous imagery of sexuality, death and lust in the shape of rotting apples, painful glimpses of aging skin and the minimal soundtrack that bring this film back to an original and psychoanalytical place. By touching on a future where clones are common place (one woman can’t stand the loss of her mother so gives birth to her clone) but not accepted by society, there are hints here at ideas of immigration and society’s ability to shun and exclude those who we don’t understand. In the Q & A, Fliegauf was asked why he decided to make Womb his first English language film, a poignant question to which he responded: “Everyone talks in English now, if I shot it in Hungarian it would just have to be translated again anyway.” The ideas of cloning and replicas that form the heart of this piece can be seen as this larger metaphor for the colonialism that the English language is still inflicting on the world.