11/08/2010

On a windswept beach with crashing waves, Rebecca and Tommy met as children. He lives this landscape on a metaphysical journey so savage that it seems unnatural, while she – staying at her grandfather’s – is waiting to move to Japan. Their tale of childhood love ends with a missed meeting on the pier on the morning she has to leave, and a note from Tommy with the words: “Everything will come to you in time”. Twelve years later, Rebecca (played by Eva Green) comes back. Time seems to be standing still. She waits and waits, but Tommy has died in an accident. Feeling a little guilty and not very keen on giving up her one and only love, Rebecca decides to clone him.

The core of Womb [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Hungarian helmer Benedek Fliegauf’s English-language debut, shows the ease with which the director of Milky Way (2007 Golden Leopard in the Cineasti del Presente section) seemingly transforms a romantic event into a test of “bioethics sci-fi”. Science fiction, he says, is the least of his interests. He succeeds nevertheless in transporting the audience to a near future where everything is similar to ours, except that clones are the order of the day, and they discriminate like X-Men (“We smell the washing-up liquid.”). Meanwhile the new Tommy is growing with a few friends, the beach (the Sankt Peter-Ording, on the German coast of the North Sea (photography by Péter Szatmari) and the attention of the mother.

Here we are not like the gay zombies of Bruce LaBruce, who has monopolised debates and idle chatter of the festival. The questions posed in Womb [+see also:
trailer
film profile] resonate for longer (and certainly deeper), asking us to what extent we are ready to live the love of our life and to what degree genetics dictated by law are about feelings. Of course, at times demands mean that we may get stifled by the aesthetic pack, but are we not guilty of reducing everything to a question of suspense (was it incest or not?).

Produced by Razor Film Produktion and Inforg Studio in co-production with ZDF/Arte, ARTE France Cinéma, Boje Buck Produktion and A.s.a.p. films, Womb [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is sold worldwide through The Match Factory.

(Translated from Italian)