Review: THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN

A little girl recalls a dream of waking in a forest when it is raining. She goes up to her father and shows him a grasshopper she has caught. A little later he's inside the house, looking out at the pool. Something's wrong. Cut to the girl floating motionless in the pool. Dad comes out, takes his time to remove his shirt and comments: Not again. He steps down into the water and lifts her back to the ground like a doll. Later on the couch he uses a digital tablet to reboot her. She smiles and greets him. Android.

They live in a contemporary house in the woods somewhere outside Vienna and go about their days like father and daughter. A mother is mentioned in a voiceover but does not appear, departed without explanation. The man has constructed a working model of his daughter who left of her own accord years before without being found. That's all very Hallmark until you get to the scene where he removes her tongue and genital apparatus to clean them. No more Hallmark. 

And then even Elli the android leaves, gets lost in the woods and wanders out to a road at night. She is picked up by a man who recognises that she is artificial and conveys her to his aging mother as a companion. Elli asks too many questions so the old woman wants her gone. Instead, her son returns to turn Elli into his mother's brother, decades dead. Now Emil, Elli has to work out who she is meant to be and how to use her programming to make a life of it.

This sombre piece only partially plays as Joy Division cover of A.I., raising questions of very stark morality and the human responsibility for its own inventions, it also serves as a leather-tough examination of what young humans make of being expected to behave as their elders expect. Elli's programming has a disturbing duality in that she plays like a child but talks more maturely when intimate. Are we witnessing an ideal of the former relationship with the real Elli or a kind of dissociative coping? Either way, it leaves her father untroubled. Or does it? A rare scene of him at the workplace in what looks like an underground tunnel construction site he sees a blurry figure of her against a wall and stares at it as though haunted. As Emil (a process that can be done with a face switch and an upload or two) he is assumed to accept a new role, seemingly on the strength of a few potentially violent fragments of the old woman's memory.

Told within a tight square frame that renders even wide open landscapes claustrophobic The Trouble With Being Born leaves us little room for sentimentalising these situations. While it keeps firmly short of sensationalism that might push things the other way (there is NO sex depicted with the child actor who wears a silicon mask and whose nudity in some scenes is computer generated) it gives its viewers a clear shot at the distribution of power in each scene. We are given a wealth of detail that will allow us to piece together what we are not shown in the long as well as short term including the opportunity at self-interrogation as to how we are receiving this hard and strange story.

When people were changing from 4X3 TVs and getting widescreens and changing VCRs for DVDs I saw many sets and players abandoned on the footpaths and nature strips. I will never forget two sights: two large old boxy TVs with their screens facing each other; a VCR with the remote taped to the top. The first looked like an embrace between two evicted people. The second looked like a dog abandoned with a box of tinned food beside it. I'll let you imagine how I felt watching this one.