The Rebirth of Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Birth’

With the release of the Criterion edition of Jonathan Glazer’s Birth in late January, the film’s rocky 21-year journey to respectability has finally come to an end, even if it may never ease the doubts of those who remain thoroughly skeeved out by it. When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in the fall of 2004, Glazer did not yet have the reputational armor to absorb the boos and catcalls that rained down on the film from the audience, or the reviews that questioned his judgment in staging this peculiar, po-faced fairytale about a widow and the 10-year-boy who claims to be her reincarnated husband. At the time, Glazer was merely a promising young director who’d cut his teeth on innovative videos and advertisements before debuting with Sexy Beast, a deliciously nasty genre exercise that didn’t seem to presage a brilliant career. He wouldn’t surface again until Under the Skin in 2013 and The Zone of Interest a full decade after that, each new film beckoning critics to rethink their initial impression of Birth. 

The Stanley Kubrick comparisons are, by now, unavoidable, given the enormous amount of time Glazer takes between projects, the fussed-over precision of his technique, and his ice-cold assessment of human nature—which, like Kubrick, can be extremely deceptive. The other thing pertinent to Kubrick, at least in the case of Birth, is that many of his films were pilloried by critics when they were first released and only later understood as significant. (Kubrick’s last four films—Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut—all follow a similar trajectory in that regard.) Only through an accident of timing—though the global tilting toward fascism and genocide is a cynical thing—did The Zone of Interest seem in step with contemporary reality, but otherwise Glazer operates on his own timetable and his own rhythm, which can make his work feel either singular or conspicuously out of step. (See also: Dreyer, Carl Theodor.) 

To be fair, it is not unreasonable to consider Birth a singularly off-putting film. The idea of a love story involving reincarnation or some metaphysical romance between the living and dead was neither new nor transgressive. It’s romantic to think about love as a force that transcends mortal limits, which is why something like Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death remains such a treasured classic. But when the vessel turns out to be a 10-year-old boy with cherubic cheeks and an eerily austere manner, you’re confronting the audience with a fantasy they do not want to see. (And, according to Glazer, you’re also confronting the studio with a commercial problem that never stopped freaking them the hell out.) There’s context for a notorious scene where the boy slips into a bath with the grown woman he insists is his wife, but it’s nonetheless a rational leap that’s difficult to make. 

Glazer developed this wisp of an idea with the legendary screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who was most famous for his collaborations with Luis Buñuel on films like Belle du Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but had also made the impossible possible with The Return of Martin Guerre, a 1982 drama about an imposter returning to another man’s home after a war in 16th century French. Carrière and Glazer, along with a third writer, Milo Addica, set the tone immediately with a piece of voiceover narration from Sean, a man of science who admits that if he lost his wife and a little bird landed on his windowsill the next day, claiming to be her, he’d be “stuck with the bird.” But it doesn’t quite work out that way in Birth, which opens with a mesmerizing shot of the adult Sean jogging through Central Park and collapsing in a tunnel where no one can see him or come to his aid.