Austria/Germany | 2020 | Directed by Sandra Wollner
Logline: An android, used by a man and then an old woman, both dealing with loss, finds itself becoming lost and confused by its own programmed memories.
Elli (Lena Watson) is a ten-year-old girl living with her father (Dominik Warta) in an idyllic, secluded country home. She muses by the pool with memories of days past. It’s soon apparent that the mother is long gone, and the father is most likely a divorcee with full custody. But there is something wrong with this picture, something very uneasy.
The father sees Elli floating face down in the pool. “Not again,” he mutters, swiftly pulling the unresponsive girl from the water. In the living room, the girl is propped up on the sofa, and the man is fiddling with a small console or smart phone. Elli comes to life. The man has successfully rescued/re-booted her. She is an android.
We soon understand that Elli is a facsimile of his daughter, who vanished ten years earlier. Later in the movie the father is visited by the ghost memory of his daughter, as she would now look, aged twenty (Jane McKinnon), but in the present the father is dealing with an ingrained loneliness, a kind of soulless existence. He has programmed the android with select memories, and as such, Elli goes through the motions, familiar routines, the most disturbing of which is a heavily implied (but never shown) sexual relationship with the middle-aged man.
The concept of incest alone is confronting, but is compounded by the robot’s physical resemblance to his young daughter. The behaviour is further muddied by having the robot girl unperturbed by the sexual relationship, simply treating it matter-of-factly, “We swam all day, and were up all night.” The quicksand of morality in a high-tech world.
But more chillingly, director Wollner and her co-writer Roderick Warich present this adult behaviour with such a detached and cold perspective, it suggests that pedophilia in this near future existence has become even more insidious (accepted??). Is Wollner implying that trying to eradicate such sexual aberration will be impossible, but with sex robots the problem can be diverted with minimal damage to human life? There are many difficult questions posed in this dark (both literally and figuratively) drama.
Ostensibly the movie is concerned with the themes of memory, identity, and loneliness, but having read that the director originally had the daughter/android character as a twenty-year-old, but then decided to change the age to ten, makes for difficult accommodation. In what must be a precedent, the young actor, Lena Watson, took on a stage name and had two silicone masks and wigs to disguise her true identity. The two nude scenes - one in particular will leave a lasting impression, due to its graphic depiction of the cleaning routine of owning a sex doll (android) - were achieved by filming the young actor in a bikini and then using CGI. Apparently the young actor’s parents and the girl loved working with the director. This only plants more questions in my mind, but I digress.
There is a strong dream-like atmosphere to the movie, Lynchian in its creepiness. I’m reminded of the starkness and desolation of Ulrich Seidl and Stanley Kubrick’s films, the slow-burn tendrils of Andrei Tarkovsky, and the tenebrous mood of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. The medium-format cinematography is superb, although some of the exterior night scenes are almost impenetrably dark.
The Trouble with Being Born is a challenging journey through fabricated truths, unreliable memoirs, and the deep scars of loss and guilt. It deals with a fractured, corrupted psychology, and it refuses to piece all the parts of the jigsaw. I feel The Trouble with Being Alive a more apt title. Elli’s identity is transmogrified, living one life - one gender - and then transplanted into another (later in the movie she becomes separated from her father/owner, and finds her/himself in the possession of an elderly woman), her perception of what is right and what is wrong does not exist, she struggles, but can’t comprehend, her programming and processing acting as both cushion and captive high fence. The memories of her father’s and, later, of the old woman who adopts her are ghosts in the machine, slowly dissolving her manufactured psyche, her fabricated morality.
The Trouble with Being Born is a deeply, dangerously provocative movie. Beautifully made, it is subversive, transgressive, even. Powerful, thought-provoking stuff for those prepared to unplug their knee-jerk sensibilities.