1.82:1 DVD capture: Birth The DVD

New Line presents Birth on DVD in a defiantly filmlike 1.82:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. This is as canny an approximation of the celluloid mien as I've seen (while excluding specks of dust and general wear-and-tear, natch)--meaning, of course, that it will fail to meet the plastic standards to which most tech mavens hold anything brought into the digital realm nowadays. As I missed the window of opportunity to see Birth in a theatre, I found the organic quality of the image totally gratifying. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is equally transporting, with Alexandre Desplat's lush score and expansive arrangements entombing the viewer in the movie's sense of dread. That being said, one wonders why the talkfest Vera Drake merited a DTS track while the music- heavy, nay, dependent Birth did not. Trailers for Monster-in-Law, The Upside of Anger, Bright Young Things, Vera Drake, and The New World (Terrence Malick's latest) round out the regrettably sparse platter.-

The Film
excerpted from a longer review found here

Jonathan Glazer's Birth looks, sounds, and feels like a Carl Theodor Dreyer film--in particular Gertrud, though to some extent Ordet, Day of Wrath, and, in Nicole Kidman's extraordinary stillness, The Passion of Joan of Arc as well. Glazer and DP Harris Savides (fresh off his dual triumphs with Gus Van Sant, Gerry and Elephant) mine the portfolio of Dreyer's cinematographer Henning Bendtsen to create an astonishingly textured New York wintertime composed of the same sorts of shades of white and brown in which most modern viewers first discover Dreyer. Intriguingly, Glazer and Savides decided to shoot some of the action in takes nearly as long as an entire reel, which is anathema in this day of whip-cuts and anxious cameras. (A similar approach accounts for Gertrud's crash-and-burn in a 1964 aflame with the Nouvelle Vague.) Birth is extraordinarily patient with its story and, again like a Dreyer film, feels airless until the full implications of its psychosexual play begin to unfold.

Anna (Kidman), ten years removed from losing her husband, is on the verge of marrying lunk Joseph (Danny Huston), with whom she appears to harbour a grudging affection. Her vision of an idealized love that surpasses all consideration of earthly possibility (Gertrud again) has made her an emotional eunuch, an idea reflected in Kidman's performance as a woman cloistered away in her swank penthouse, hobbling around as if on stilts in her carefully tailored designer skirts. Enter Sean (Godsend's Cameron Bright, in his second reincarnate role in this year), a reserved ten-year-old with a long stare who has a lot of information regarding Anna's dead husband--who, in fact, claims to be him.

There's nothing easy about Birth. From premise to execution, the film is intensely mature and deadly steady in its ability to hone in on the things that make us uncomfortable about love. (It's obsessive, for one, and its passion is a crucible for Anna.) One lengthy, uninterrupted close-up of Anna watching a Wagner opera (never the opera--the camera is trained on her face (see capture above)) is among the most beautiful contemplations of obsession and dementia in movies. Not inconsequential to note that the choice of Wagner (the second prelude to his Ring Cycle) is itself invested in the incidentals of moving along, sure, but also in the making of mythology and the distillation of the same into mediums of different shapes and capacities.

The opening scene is a rapturous Steadicam tracking shot presided over by the technology's inventor Garrett Brown, on set for just that one day. In its setting, in its grace following an anonymous jogger as he dies in a vaginal tunnel in New York's Central Park, it echoes the labyrinth shots that close Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. And the marriage of Kubrick and Dreyer, evoked in the projection of the characters' interiors onto the realities of this screen, is what most intoxicates about Birth. The central moment of the film, by way of notoriety, finds Sean getting into the tub with Anna. Raising the quick clamour of carefully bred outrage that Birth is paedophilic, the scene is as imperiously gravid as the moments leading up to it (and the moments that follow), and any dismissal of it glosses over Glazer's recurring birth imagery. The frightening idea is that Anna is marinating herself in the past and luxuriating in the possibility that Sean is exactly what he says he is. In its uncompromising nature, in its flawless execution, Birth is one of the best films of the year.-