The opening sequence of Birth, a suave and brooding gothic tale directed by Jonathan Glazer, is a small tour de force. It takes a perfectly ordinary urban moment -- a jog through Central Park in wintertime -- and turns it into a visual and aural overture for the film's layered and shifting moods.
As a long tracking shot follows the dark-hooded jogger past heavy, snow-shagged trees (photographed by the excellent Harris Savides), Alexandre Desplat's score offers a compressed foreshadowing of the emotions Glazer will go on to explore, nudging dissonant registers of feeling into deceptively smooth harmony. A tinkle of childish whimsy slides into a swell of string-heavy melodrama, which disappears into deep bass tones full of menace and foreboding.
The music sharpens your attention and throws you a little off balance, which is apt preparation for what follows. The runner suddenly collapses beneath an underpass, as if caught in the darkness between two worlds. The rest of Birth takes place in a similar limbo. Like one of Henry James's ghost stories, it stakes out an agnostic, ambiguous position on the existence of supernatural phenomena.
At times, the movie seems to be headed for a neat, either-or resolution -- threatening to become either a highbrow version of Ghost or a supremely elegant episode of Scooby-Doo -- but its interests turn out to be more psychological than supernatural.
The screenwriters, Milo Addica (who was a co-writer of Monster's Ball), Jean-Claude Carriere (whose long career includes two decades of collaboration with Luis Bunuel) and Glazer are more concerned with atmosphere than with explanation, and the key to appreciating Birth is not so much a suspension of disbelief as an anxious surrender of reason.
The man who died in the park was named Sean, and 10 years after his death his widow, Anna (Nicole Kidman), is preparing to remarry. She and her fiance, Joseph (Danny Huston) live in a vast East Side apartment owned -- ruled may be the better word -- by Anna's mother, played with steely wit by Lauren Bacall.
On the night of Joseph and Anna's engagement party, a young boy with close-cropped hair and a round, serious face shows up claiming to be Sean and pleading with her not to marry Joseph. The boy's deadpan persistence throws the household off balance.
Is he playing a mean prank or indulging a childish fantasy? Or could he be telling the truth? Cameron Bright, who plays Sean (which happens to be the boy's real name), gives an unnervingly controlled performance. The film's delicate mood of indeterminacy rests on his shoulders, or rather in his smooth, inscrutable face. His character represents a premise that is absurd, even ridiculous, but for Birth to work it must be addressed with utter seriousness, even solemnity.
And somehow, in Glazer's hands, it does work. The hushed, claustrophobic ambience of high privilege and repressed feeling occasionally cracks, as this horror movie reveals itself also to be a rich, agonizing melodrama and a dry comedy of manners set in a fantasy Manhattan of creme caramel wainscoting and black-tie evenings at the opera.
Both the humor and the pathos arise from the attempts by the stiff, decorous adults to deal with the unwelcome child in their midst. Anna's mother humors him ("so how is little Reincarnation enjoying his cake?"), while Joseph drifts from tight-jawed skepticism toward violent jealousy.
The most important response, of course, is Anna's, and it is also the most complicated. Kidman, her hair cut short and dyed dark red, conveys both the toughness of a woman who has pulled herself together after a traumatic loss and the vulnerability of someone whose grieving has remained incomplete. As much as Desplat's score or Glazer's sly pacing, it is Kidman's face that holds you in a spell of uncertainty.
She has an uncanny ability to register large feelings with tiny gestures, which Glazer exploits by filming her in long, silent close-ups. Without Kidman's brilliantly nuanced performance, Birth might feel arch, chilly and a little sadistic, but she gives herself so completely to the role that the film becomes both spellbinding and heartbreaking, a delicate chamber piece with the large, troubled heart of an opera.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist