Directed By Women: Birth/Rebirth (2023)

IFC Films

“Birth/Rebirth” is what I like to call an odd little film. The kind you probably shouldn’t watch while you eat.

It benefits from multiple viewings, and a sense of trust that the medical professionals know what they’re doing. Because in writer/director Laura Moss’s dark meditation on motherhood and Frankenstein, they’re clearly interested in the science of it all. If you were actually skilled and twisted enough to successfully reanimate a human corpse, what exactly would it involve?

The short answer is in some ways what you would expect: a whole lot of gruesome. And it takes all types to make it happen. The duo who bring it about, and who eventually become a twisted, odd couple co-parenting unit, are the kind of polar opposites who are brought together by their mutual interest in the undead six-year-old girl who comes to (re)define their lives.

Celie Morales (Judy Reyes) is the warmly empathetic embodiment of motherhood. Her daughter, the soon to be deceased Lila (A.J. Lister), conceived, we later discover, via IVF, is the sort of adorable moppet who will respond to her mother’s distracted state by telling her a secret: “I’m not getting enough attention.”

It’s so effortlessly sweet that getting invested in mother and daughter is one of the easier demands “Birth/Rebirth” makes, and it’s especially crucial once things really get going and the movie reveals what Celie is willing to do in the name of motherly love. 

The other half of what is to come is naturally a very deliberate contrast. A pathologist at the same hospital where Celie works as a nurse, Rose Casper (Marin Ireland) is the source of much of the film’s dark humor and its spirit. She’s the one who’s been interested in reanimating corpses since second grade, with tales of cutting off starfish legs and similar, disastrous experiments on the class hamster.

As an adult, Rose is far more comfortable around the dead bodies she’s made her life’s work, coldly dismissive of colleagues and the guy she masturbates in the bathroom to get the necessary materials for her process. She’s so socially inept in fact that she doesn’t predict that someone is bound to come looking for Lila after she tragically passes and Rose makes off with her deceased body for her obsessive quest in treating death as if it were a scientific obstacle to surmount.

To be fair, she could hardly anticipate that Celie would know to go straight to the hospital basement and track down Rose at her coldly efficient apartment to claim her daughter’s body, only to discover exactly what Rose has been up to. Like the busy single mother she is, Celie doesn’t waste time condemning, going straight into mom and nurse mode, eventually moving in with Rose in order to aid her and track Lila’s progress.

The work that they do involves the aforementioned gruesomeness of motherhood that we tend to not want to acknowledge, from the routine checkups like amniocentesis, which involve a very long needle being inserted into a pregnant woman’s belly, and the everyday efforts that involve keeping Lila reanimated.

Much like old age, motherhood ain’t for sissies. In their efforts to keep it going, Rose and Celie begin to take on each other’s characteristics, with Celie isolating herself from her well-meaning friends and Rose becoming warmer to a degree that her startled coworker asks her if she’s okay when he sees her smiling. 

It’s hardly the expected route to take, with cinema’s long tradition of creepy kids in horror that shows no signs of slowing down, from “The Bad Seed” to “Pet Sematary” to “Sinister” to more recently, “Hereditary.” But “Birth/Rebirth” keeps it real, in a manner of speaking, with the revived Lila exhibiting more of the limited motor skills and speech patterns that would be expected from such a grisly turn of events.

It’s refreshing in a way to see a movie that never forgets that in the best of circumstances, birth (at least from what I can gather from my own childfree by choice status) is a “disgusting and beautiful process.” Not to mention a bold choice to make those responsible for bringing the unnatural state of affairs into the world as the potential monsters. After all, much like the “Frankenstein” story that serves as the inspiration for this dark and twisted tale, the so-called monster didn’t ask to be created, and is not the real source of the horror to follow.

It’s us. It’s always us.

52 Films By Women: Lady Bird (2017)

IMDB

By Andrea Thompson

When Greta Gerwig’s masterpiece “Lady Bird” came out in 2017, it was lavished with much-deserved critical praise, and some record-breaking commercial success, given that it had the highest grossing limited theatrical release by a female director. It also inspired a highly contentious debate, one that seemed entirely beside the point, and often had misogynistic over and undertones. Was the film’s central relationship, that of between the title character played by Saoirse Ronan, and her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) abusive? Or more accurately, was Marion an abusive parent?

I suppose when you have a mother who is as imperfect, and yes, at times outright cruel to her daughter, such conclusions can hardly be avoided. Why did I call it beside the point? Because Gerwig captures each character, be they front and center or supporting, with such nuance and precision, that it doesn’t really matter. No one achieves that magical, wholly impossible state where they become so perfect they’re worth rooting for at all times. 

That includes Lady Bird, or Christine, a student at a Catholic high school in Sacramento, California, in 2002. Lady Bird feels stifled by her surroundings, referring to her hometown as “the Midwest of California,” longing to escape to college on the East Coast, specifically to New York City, that mecca of all who are even slightly artistically inclined, or just ambitious in general. It’s a move her mother vehemently opposes due to financial concerns.

IMDB

Nevertheless, Marion and Lady Bird’s bond is very real, strong, and complicated like many mother-daughter bonds tend to be. Marion may belittle her daughter when she doesn’t do simple things like put her clothes away, shame her for being unaware of her father’s depression, and constantly accuse her of being ungrateful, but the painful beauty of the film is that it’s understandable, albeit more so from our safe distance. Marion has endured the stress of a childhood which included an abusive alcoholic mother, and an adulthood where her financial situation remains tenuous, partly due to her husband’s mental health, and eventually, his job loss. Then there’s the money she shells out for the Catholic school Lady Bird finds so suffocating.

None of this excuses Marion’s behavior, which includes refusing to speak to her daughter after she discovers she’s planning on attending college in New York, despite Lady Bird’s tearful pleas and apologies, but it does make her human, and thus, forgivable. To paraphrase Cheryl Strayed, it’s a view of a relationship that’s “happy, humane, and occasionally all fucked up,” with an emphasis on the latter component. Most films refuse to acknowledge the role money has in shaping a person’s life and mindset, but the family’s class status dominates their decisions and how they interact with each other and the world.

In her influential essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf described how her mindset drastically changed after she inherited a substantial amount of money. Before, she had taken whatever odd jobs, writing or otherwise, that were available to her. It was a life of “fear and bitterness,” consisting of work that was hard yet difficult to live on, and always feeling the need to flatter because it seemed so necessary. Getting her own money, an amount that was enough to provide food and shelter, changed everything. She had everything she needed and always would. “Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness,” Woolf wrote. “I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me.” Very few women will experience such a reversal of fortune, and it’s the rare person who can maintain a mental equilibrium in the face of such constant pressures, which include the continual erosion of the social and economic safety net.

At least we are reassured that Marion’s sacrifices will eventually pay off, even if it isn’t explicitly stated. This movie is at least somewhat autobiographical, and while Lady Bird heads off to college in NYC, but it’s clear the naive teenager still has a lot to learn. She’s willing to learn it though, and her bond with her mother will remain strong, if only because distance is generally the first step in children actually being able to not only get along with parents, but see them as human.