Womb Blu-ray Review
Talk about your circle of life. . .
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 11, 2013
If you've ever wondered what a science fiction film directed by Ingmar Bergman might be like (and who amongst us
hasn't?), look no further than 2010's
Womb, a surprisingly staid offering from
agent provocateur Benedek
Fliegauf, a writer-director who has pretty much single handedly made a lot of film fans suddenly aware of the burgeoning
Hungarian film industry.
Womb has a lot of Bergmanesque elements, including long, lingering shots of a barren
and positively Scandinavian landscape (despite the fact that it was filmed in Germany), frolicking children who could have
come right out of
Fanny and Alexander and a frankly mentally unstable woman who could have
come right out of
Persona or
Through a Glass Darkly. Fliegauf weaves a rather hypnotic spell in
Womb, presenting a seemingly multi-generational tale that in the best science fiction fashion turns back on itself
with pretzel logic like an especially ravenous ouroboros, putting the first scenes of the film in an entirely new light. This is
a
film that doesn't wear its science fiction conventions on its veritable sleeve, instead cloaking them in a bizarre love story
that has some fairly unsettling aspects if one stops long enough to really think about it.
In a strange sort of way
Womb is similar to "Her Pilgrim Soul", one of the most fondly remembered episodes of
the
1980s
reboot of
The Twilight Zone. In both offerings we're presented with a main character who becomes obsessed
with
something of a chimera—in the television piece, it's a scientist enamored of a hologram, while in
Womb it's the
probably unhealthy attraction Rebecca (played as a little girl by Ruby O. Fee and as an adult by Eva Green) develops for
neighbor boy Thomas (Tristan Christopher as a child and Matt Smith as an adult). In both of these properties, the
object of the obsession turns out to have a hidden relationship to the obsessive character, though in the case of "Her
Pilgrim Soul" this relationship is initially hidden
from the obsessive character while in
Womb the secret is
kept from the object of obsession
by the obsessive character. When we first meet the two main characters in
Womb as children, they have an instant like
—maybe more—for each other, something that is soon thwarted when Rebecca's family moves away. Rebecca returns
to
the oceanside locale later as an adult and soon tracks down Tommy. Romance seems inevitable until the unthinkable
happens and Matt is killed in a car accident. That's when
Womb gets
really weird.
Rebecca doesn't let mere death stand in the way of her future happiness and instead decides to have Thomas cloned, a
technology which is fully functional as a commercial enterprise in
Womb's quasi-futuristic world (the fact that
Fliegauf gives us few other indications of the timeframe is one of the reasons the science fiction elements in the film are
almost subliminal at times). That sets up the rather bizarre second act of the film where Rebecca is artificially
impregnated with Tommy's clone and ultimately gives birth to him, raising the boy as her own (young clone Tommy is
once again played by Tristan Christopher). Fliegauf neither flinches from nor actually
highlights the implied incestuous subtext of this relationship, at least at the beginning, slowly but surely developing an
increasingly isolated
"mother-son" relationship due to
Womb's world full of people who openly discriminate against clones, referred
to derisively as "copies".
It becomes increasingly obvious as
Womb moves along that Rebecca's obsession isn't just unhealthy, it's in fact
destructive, though perhaps well intentioned in its own decidedly bizarre fashion. The weirdness reaches a tipping
point when the now grown Tommy (once again Matt Smith) arrives back home with a girlfriend, at which point the
Freudian (and indeed Bergmanesque) tendencies of the film go into overdrive. Has Rebecca created Tommy to be her
own personal plaything? It's something that's hinted at in the film when Rebecca gives the young clone Tommy an
animatronic baby dinosaur as a pet, a sort of cross between a living thing and a toy. One of the film's more disturbing
images deals with Tommy's unsettling rejection of this "companion" after an emotional showdown with his putative
mother. And in
Womb's formulation, there's the unexpected issue of dealing with a "plaything" that wants to
play with
you.
Womb is rather strangely both helped and hobbled by its perhaps unusual casting. Rebecca is an obviously
wounded character, one who channels her grief into ostensibly "creating" new life, but who then corrals that life into a
sort of self created prison of sorts. Green is perhaps not quite shaded enough in her portrayal, offering a sort of one
note performance that admittedly captures the obsessive compulsive streak in Rebecca's soul but which fails to convey
much else. This filmic monotone is exacerbated by Fliegauf's rather strange decision to keep Rebecca "ageless" even
as the cloned Tommy grows older. Is there some sort of hidden meaning in this, or is just a cheat?
The character of Tommy is more varied, and Matt Smith as the adult Tommy (both original and clone) also seems like
perhaps an unusual choice. One can't help but wonder if Smith's fame as the current
Doctor Who may have had
something to do with his casting, but the fact is
Womb was filmed and released very early in Smith's tenure in
the vaunted role. Smith's best work here is late in the film, when Tommy's incipient rage, anger that has been slowly
fomenting over the course of his cloned life, suddenly erupts in a truly disturbing display of aggression and retribution.
There's a brief prologue in this film that plays out in between the credits sequence that takes on a decidedly unnerving
meaning once the film reaches its climax (no pun intended—you'll understand if you see the film). The positively Oedipal
relationship between Rebecca and Tommy finally reaches its only "natural" conclusion, something which is of course
completely
unnatural. It's the Immaculate Conception reimagined as Performance Art.
