‘Birth’: The controversial Nicole Kidman movie booed at Venice Film Festival
Australian actor Nicole Kidman is one of Hollywood’s most successful stars, appearing in countless acclaimed movies, moving seamlessly between independent/arthouse productions and blockbusters. This has enabled Kidman to have an incredibly varied career, demonstrating her immense acting talents.
Through the 1990s, Kidman rose to prominence with roles in movies such as Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady, Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
Kidman then kicked off the 2000s with her first Oscar-nominated role as Satine in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! The start of the decade also saw the actor appear in Lars von Trier’s experimental drama Dogville, one of the most polarising films of her career. Filmed on a minimal soundstage, the movie was equally praised and condemned, although Kidman’s performance was spotlighted as an unequivocal strength.
Subsequently, Kidman continued to star in boundary-pushing films. The following year, she appeared in Birth by Jonathan Glazer, which received significant booing from its Venice Film Festival audience. Just like Dogville, Birth divided critics. Glazer, who found success as a music video director in the 1990s, working with the likes of Blur, Jamiroquai and Radiohead, impressed critics with his debut feature Sexy Beast in 2000.
Yet, with Birth, some critics found the themes too shocking and unsettling, although Glazer wasn’t phased by this reaction, calling the negative response “healthy”. Discussing his film with the Daily Telegraph, he revealed: “I had the idea for the film while I was walking across the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I didn’t make it to the kettle. It was a bit of a moment, yeah.”
Birth follows Kidman’s Anna, who lost her husband ten years prior and is now set to marry her new boyfriend. However, at a party, she meets a ten-year-old boy who claims to be her dead husband reincarnated. Glazer explained: “We aimed to make something robust in which every question leads to another. I’m not a Buddhist, and I don’t believe in reincarnation; I don’t think I could do a film about it if I did. I was more interested in the idea of eternal love. I wanted to make a mystery, the mystery of the heart.”
He continued: “It’s a razor’s-edge story which could have become risible or melodramatic or preposterous all the way along, right to the end. It wasn’t until I finished the film that I made sense of it. I could easily still be editing it. If they’d said to me, ‘You’ve got another six months,’ I’d have taken them.”
The movie proved particularly controversial due to one scene where it appears that Kidman and ten-year-old actor Cameron Bright are sitting naked in the bath together. However, Glazer asserted that only one shot from the sequence featured the pair in the bath together, but they were both wearing nude-coloured clothing.
Birth remains one of the most underrated dramas from the 2000s, a potent yet dreamlike, metaphysical exploration of love. Watch the trailer below.
