Here’s a film that surprised me.
Knowing a bit about it beforehand, but not quite enough is definitely recommended. Known factors: Its lead actors are Eva Green (Bertolucci protege) and Matt Smith (yes, The Doctor). That would be doubly enough for me, but Womb is also classified as a science-fiction film (though only in narrative; there are no futuristic set-pieces or anything of the sort). To provide a minor spoiler, if you must know what the film is “about”: It has to do with effects of human cloning. And the film is not at all concerned with using its subject matter to intrigue you. It is not a film about technology.
I mention this because, despite not being a “sci-fi” film on its face, it brings up more in its staging of events about this topic than I have a seen in any other film of its type that I can think of. It does all of this within the narrative itself, which is to say, there is no expositional dialogue or “lesson” entrenched into the sci-fi aspect. Yet, the film gives you plenty of space in which to contemplate the matter. I won’t say much else about it, except to mention that it is lugubriously slow and quite intentionally blunt in its presentation. From the sea blue-gray color palette to the isolated beach setting that truly does at times look how one of the characters describes it; like “the end of the world”, I was still drawn into the film and the “controversial” situation it puts itself in. I found myself asking all sorts of questions about the ramifications of such a possibility when the film was over, which one assumes is entirely the point. It’s not entirely clear to me if the ending is supposed to be as clear as I saw it, but from what I can tell, remembering the beginning is crucial to understanding a complicated facet of the topic. Man’s influence in natural selection does make for interesting (r)evolution.
Since I don’t like to spoil movies here, that’s about all I have to say at the moment. I would like to apologize to myself for having been lax in my posting, though. I have become part of the Google Image Search results fairly recently, so I present some more stills from this film in the hope that people will find them and seek it out.
a matter of life and death 