****/****
starring Judy Reyes, Marin Ireland, AJ Lister, Breeda Wool
written by Laura Moss & Brendan O’Brien
directed by Laura Moss
by Walter Chaw In this year of the distaff Frankenstein riff, sandwiched between Bomani Story’s exceptional The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Yorgos Lanthimos’s upcoming Poor Things, find Laura Moss’s fucking awesome Birth/Rebirth, which, like Story’s film, manages to smuggle in a sharp, eloquently deployed payload of social and philosophical issues alongside just enough satisfying gore and a gratifying amount of real terror. I wonder if the key to the success of these films, Story’s and Moss’s, has to do with filmmakers who aren’t white men taking their shot at interpreting what is and always has been an essentially, perhaps the essentially, progressive genre text–one authored by a woman, no less, the daughter of one of the most important figures in the early women’s-rights movement, Mary Wollstonecraft (who published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and political philosopher/anarchist William Godwin. First-time readers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might be surprised by its political sensitivities–its critique of a carceral state in which there is no forgiveness, only the presumption of guilt based mainly on appearance and social status. By how the Monster’s fate is predetermined as he’s cast off to educate himself with pilfered books and shelter amongst others whom polite society has labelled “misfit” and “outcast.” Frankenstein is a story of class war. Mary and her husband didn’t even eat sugar because of its role in the Caribbean slave trade. The Monster says, “I heard of the division of property of immense wealth and squalid poverty of ranked dissent and noble blood.” He was woke as fuck, and this was 1818.
Birth/Rebirth opens with a day in the life of maternity nurse Celie (Judy Reyes), who spends the morning wrestling with difficult daughter Lila (A.J. Lister), making herself profoundly late for work and forcing her to beg a kindly neighbour to provide a bit of free childcare. The only opportunity she has to sit down at work is on the toilet, and when she accidentally drops her phone in the john, she loses the ability to check on Lila. “Maybe I liked it,” she says later, “like a little vacation.” Lila, see, is pretty sick. Thinking back, her misbehaviour and clinginess may have had something to do with a child’s inability to ask for attention in a more articulate way. Anyway, Lila dies. Birth/Rebirth tells a parallel story about Rose (Marin Ireland), a pathologist seemingly on the spectrum who offers to jerk off a drunk at a local bar, collecting his sperm in a specimen cup and warning him not to look at her, lest she stop. It’ll be her job to process Lila’s body in the morgue, and the first time Celie talks to Rose is to listen to Rose’s explanation that Lila’s body has been transferred across town, where, Rose says, it’s gone missing. I feel like I don’t want to tell you what’s happening, but the bulk of the film is about “what’s happening,” so feel free to jump off the train at this stop.
What’s happening is that Rose has taken Lila’s body home with her because she’s developed a process using stem cells to bring things back from the dead. She started with a pet pig and now she’s moving on to a human trial. She finds face-to-face interactions impossible, however, which I take to explain why she’s not going about this through proper channels, though the why of it is probably less important than how Birth/Rebirth makes Celie and Rose symbols of how society treats people who are poor, Dominican, neurodivergent… Different, in other words, in ways that make others uncomfortable no matter how functional, how vital they are in the perpetuation of society and evolution of our culture. Celie does difficult, specialized work, but she can’t pay for childcare and is barely making it as a single mother. Rose is obviously brilliant and great at her job, yet others find her so off-putting that even a scene where one of her superiors (LaChanze) is showing her a little compassion ends with a misunderstanding and a harsh word. Upon learning that Lila is alive but, you know, changed, Celie invites herself into Rose’s routine to help care for her kid. Rose doesn’t object, maybe since it’s easier to enlist Rose than to find a way to silence her. A mother’s love for her daughter doesn’t enter into the equation. I doubt it ever crosses Rose’s mind.
The character work in Birth/Rebirth is an astonishment. Ireland’s Rose is mesmerizing. There’s a scene where she runs into a room naked from the shower to check on a noise she’s heard and allows a feral Lila to touch the staples holding a massive surgery scar together on Rose’s lower stomach. She doesn’t allow it out of tenderness but rather cold, scientific curiosity. I think she’s wondering if Lila is so far gone that she’ll rip the staples out. I haven’t cringed so hard at an image in a long time. As Celie, Reyes is another wonder: running from exasperation unto hate to profound guilt and then elation. Then fear with an almost supernatural precision. Fall too far on either side and the gamut is unconvincingly muted or overwrought and keening. The two actors walk a highwire, and the choreography is as intricate and expressive as a tango. The film raises the abortion question, too–the morality of using natal tissue in miraculous cures and the ethics of medical experimentation when the disease being cured is death. Late in the film, Celie is tasked with caring for a privileged white woman (Breeda Wool) who has made it her job to be an expert in her own pregnancy. When she determines that a different hospital, farther away, will better suit her needs, she makes a point of reassuring Celie it has nothing to do with her. The act of explaining herself, of course, is the lady doth protesting too much, and Celie knows it because she’s accustomed to being spoken to this way, with this sort of kind, by wealthy white women. She makes a decision at that moment, and the cyclical course of the film’s atrocity, indicated by its title, takes on a horrible shape.
Birth/Rebirth horrified me because I empathized with everyone in it: with the doctor, with the nurse, even with the monster. They’re all monsters. Celie is giving new Lila a bath one night, which is already hair-raising because it’s uncertain what Lila is going to do from one moment to the next, but then Celie sings a song Lila knows, and Lila tries to clap at the right time. It’s a little like that scene in Day of the Dead where Bub the zombie indicates he likes Beethoven; it’s one thing to make a monster, another altogether when the monster turns out to be just another broken-down, lonesome person capable of appreciating great beauty. As a parent twice over, I have often lain awake wondering if it was a mistake to introduce children into this world. And just as often, I have wondered if it would have been right for the world for me not to introduce these children into it. You wrestle over these things when you create people who will suffer unimaginably and you know it. But they will love, too, and bring something into the world that wasn’t there before. What is your responsibility for their lives, and do they have any for yours? Birth/Rebirth is scary as fuck, not the jumpy kind of scary (though there’s one lovely startle in it), but the kind where you’re forced to challenge your beliefs against a credible model for coping with unendurable grief. Celie has given her life in the care of others and that’s over now. She’s given enough. Rose wants to be left alone to satisfy her curiosity. They discover in each other a viable reason to stop participating in a society that takes them for granted. God help us all.
