The Melbourne International Film Festival wouldn’t screen The Trouble with Being Born when it came out in 2020. Likely to be “used as a source of arousal for men interested in child abuse material,” said the two forensic psychologists who informed its decision. Director Sandra Wollner’s German-language film ran into trouble at the Berlin Film Festival too, though it also won a special jury prize, just one of many from countless international film festivals.
Not that awards and bans are usually much to go on, but in this case the various responses do say something. This is a tough film but a good one. Tough not because of the suggestions of paedophilia but because of its depiction of extreme loneliness. It’s bleak, and then some.
Borrowing its title from Emil Cioran’s 1973 book of philosophical aphorisms (for reasons that elude me), it divides into two episodes, the pair of them united by the android played by Lena Watson. In an echo of the fascinating movie Robot & Frank, Watson is a companion bot to two people. First, Georg (Dominik Warta), a father who’s replaced a daughter who’s gone missing with this lookalike stand-in, a robot he cuddles in the swimming pool, and takes to bed with him in the evening. At first we don’t realise that Elli, as he calls her, is an android. Wollner hints at it but only lets us know definitively in a scene that’s probably the one that got the two forensic psychologists twitching in which Elli sits naked on a table. For anyone worried about scenes like this, Watson was never naked in this film. It’s all CGI. Also, Lena Watson is not the young actor’s real name.
In the second chunk Elli has become the companion bot to Mrs Schikowa (Ingrid Burkhard), a lonely old lady. If Georg’s story is creepy but also instructive – not letting go of the past clearly has damaging implications – Schikowa’s is just downright desperate, a bulletin from the frontline of solitary despair.
While she’s with Mrs Schikowa Elli passes themself off as her dead son, a haircut, some black hairdye, a bit of reprogramming et voilà. Sometimes snatches of her previous life with Georg intrude – a line from a story he told her, a little orgasmic cry in the night.
We almost wonder if Elli has emotions but it seems she doesn’t. She is the “antithesis to Pinocchio” as Wollner put it in an interview, the little boy/girl who doesn’t want to grow up to be a human, who is perfectly happy (or whatever, since there is no emotion beyond what is expected of her) to carry on as he/she is. Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence is also a reference, she says, and it clearly is.
This is a film about emotions rather than developments in cyborg technology. Wollner shoots it all very dark and with an emphasis on emptiness – Georg lives alone out in a wooded wilderness. Frau Schikowa is also alone, high in a tower block where no one communicates with her. Her dog, old like her, isn’t much of a companion.
What a muted, intense mood this film has. Though languid occasionally shades into torpid, the technicals are beyond reproach. Cinematographer Timm Kröger gives Wollner visuals that are claustrophobic and deliberately underlit. The soundtrack by Peter Kutin and David Schweighart is like music from a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie heard from one room away.
I liked Dominik Warta’s performance as Georg, not so much a creep as a guy who’s got it all badly wrong. Watson is also very good as Elli, suggesting a child’s vulnerability and a computer’s remoteness at one and the same time (the smooth facial prosthetic helps). Best of all is Ingrid Burkhard, who wrings all kinds of awful from her portrayal of Frau Schikowa – desperate but getting on with it.
It’s spooky, spooky as hell, all of it, both with Georg and with Frau Schikowa. Until it eventually yields to something so grim that you’re kind of glad you can hardly see what’s going on.
Tough going, but the best thing I’ve seen for a while.
The Trouble with Being Born – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
