2024-01-11 13:19:58
Is it a capsule, a pod or an egg? The thing shines in pastel pink, light blue and beige tones. It is the size of a late-month pregnant belly. If you press the right button, a rectangular section of the oval object becomes transparent – and you can see what’s going on inside like on a mini screen: the miracle of human life, including the heartbeat. And what is cinema other than a great process of creation, the birth of the world from the spirit of celluloid?
The drama “Baby to go” (originally: “The Pod Generation”) by the French-American director and screenwriter Sophie Barthes chooses a soft, creamy aesthetic for the science fiction scenario that takes place in the near future. Similar to Spike Jonze with “Her”, Barthes does not give the time ahead an ugly face of destruction, but rather a stylish elegance. The devices with which people interact here do not empty their lives to the point of soullessness, but rather make them easier. There is a floating grace that drapes over the scenes and characters, making the cinematic experience that tingling, calming “ASMR” (“autonomous sensory meridian response”) event that it is the protagonist Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor, “12 Years a Slave”) gives over his ear pods.
Happy father: Alvy’s child grows up in a capsule
Those: Splendid Film
At the center of the plot is a small, rather insignificant marital conflict between Alvy and his wife Rachel (Emilia Clarke). The couple agree that they want a child. However, there is disagreement regarding the question of how this should be accomplished. The “natural” or the “artificial”, although no one can really explain where this line runs exactly. Alvy describes the Womb Center’s offer of renting a capsule in which you can have your child to term as “artificial” and therefore to be rejected. This seems to be the solution to a number of problems: declining birth rates, labor shortages, female poverty in old age, fewer women in leadership positions, and disease risks for children and mothers.
Promise of ectogenesis
What British scientist JBS Haldane called ectogenesis in 1920 is an old fantasy. We have never been as close to fulfilling it as we are today. For years, scientists have been researching the “breeding” of embryos and the care of premature births in so-called “biobags” in order to possibly one day outsource the entire pregnancy to the technology. In 1971, feminist Shulmaith Firestone wrote that pregnancy was “barbaric.” The philosopher Anna Smajdor argues in her essay published in 2007, which is well worth reading for a “moral duty to ectogenesis” because the “pathological nature of pregnancy and birth” puts women at a disadvantage compared to men, but at the same time children are needed for the survival of the species.
also read
Alvy and Rachel embody a modern city couple in their thirties and forties, whose opposites never tip over into cliché: botanist Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor) nostalgically clings to the past. At first he doesn’t feel comfortable seeing his child growing up in plastic packaging. He leads his students through a greenhouse, where the young people look at the plants around them with surprise and disgust. When Alvy picks a fig and asks everyone around who dares to eat it, he gets confused looks. “It’s from the tree, Professor!” explains one student indignantly. “Exactly,” that’s the point, Alvy replies.
Rachel, on the other hand, has little use for greens. She acts as a determined career woman who brings home the money and gratefully accepts her employer’s offer to secure her a place at the Womb Center.
Parents: Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Rachel (Emilia Clarke)
Those: Splendid Film
In order to change Alvy’s mind, Rachel arranges a meeting with friends who act as feminist believers: Alice (Vinette Robinson) lectures as if in a gender studies seminar that women are idealized by society instead of respected, and as soon as they need something, They were suddenly “no longer Madonnas, but needy sluts.” Their pain was never taken seriously, yet it would be so easy to get rid of it – the weight gain, the stretch marks, the morning sickness.
“It is,” says Alice, marking the new turning point, “the first time in history that we women are not victims of our biology.” Her husband Ben (Jelle De Beule) nods affirmatively. “It’s the solution.” “The ultra solution,” he is immediately corrected by his wife, who is also not afraid to refute Freud: “For centuries, women have been taught to believe that something is missing from them. It’s very clear to me that all along it was the men who probably had uterus envy.”
But psychoanalysis declares war on the “baby to go” mentality, and not just when it comes to penis envy. The meaning of dreaming also appears to be a mere relic of “the 20th century” in the technologically upgraded future, as Rachel’s digital therapist – an oversized moss eye – notes. “Rachel, let’s not forget that dreams are not reliable material for analysis,” she chides her patient, who wants to tell her about the strange things that happened to her in her sleep. During a tour of the Womb Center, a concerned visitor asks why his nephew, who was born here, has never dreamed. “No need to worry,” the expert reassures and leaves it at that.
New naturalness?
It’s the details that Barthes pays loving attention to: In order to build a bond with his child before birth, Alvy rocks the pod back and forth on the playground. He talks to him, shows him his greenhouse and takes him to work – not strapped to his back, as most fathers do, but to his stomach, which unsettles Rachel. In the evening, the couple is faced with the question of whether they should have sex in front of the pod or whether it would be better to ban the pod from the bedroom as a precaution.
As Alvy strokes the smooth surface of the pod and watches Werner Herzog’s documentary “Encounters at the End of the World” on the television, he begins to sob quietly. The scene in which a penguin separates from his colony and runs alone to certain death is too shocking. Where Herzog humanizes the penguins, it is Barthes who brings the people who look after the eggs closer to the animals. On YouTube, a comment under the trailer noted that it looked like a “movie about baby dragons without all the drama” – a reference to the role of the mother dragon in “Games of Thrones,” which made Emilia Clarke famous.
also read
“Progress has never made anyone superfluous. He’s here to help,” it says at one point – a classic science fiction film would have used this gesture of carefreeness, borrowed from the horror genre, as an opportunity to show the viewer the naivety behind it with all its catastrophic consequences lead. Not so with Barthes: although she remains critical, her uncanny vision never loses its ambiguity, its oscillation between risk and opportunity.
In just a few years, we may look at fetuses that grow up outside the womb with the same level of confidence as we do today on children who were conceived outside of it. The first baby conceived through in vitro fertilization was born in 1978. At the time, skeptics spoke of it as a “work of the devil.” The critics don’t go that far in “Baby to Go”, even Alvy is rather carelessly fighting a losing battle.
Rachel (Emilia Clarke) with her artificial therapist
Those: Splendid Film
The fact that “Baby to go” does not degenerate into another technologically skeptical totalitarianism warning in the style of “Matrix” or “Gattaca” is due not least to the costume designer Emmanuelle Youchnowki and the set designer Stephan Rubens, who fashionably patterned oxygen cafes Pod carrier bags and pastel-creamy home furnishings bring a gentleness and non-violence into the world they imagine, which fit into the smooth surfaces of the ubiquitous smartphones, EarPods and laptops more appropriately than many a rough, steel vision of the science fiction tradition. The capsule, which combines botany, pharmacy, space and biology, is becoming a futuristic form par excellence.
During a tour of the Womb Center, a father asks what happens when the baby gets bored in his pod. But the ultra-solutions company also has a solution for this: you can play music and podcasts to the egg in all languages. “Baby to go” is the anti-excitement film that foregoes serving the viewer a technologically precisely measured portion of excitement, humor and social criticism in its dark, closed, artificial cinema hall. The fact that “Baby to Go” refuses this imperative by providing few turning points and arcs of suspense beyond precise observations can be found boring. Or see it as a rebellion against the terror of entertainment, whose greatest enemy is boredom.
The film “Baby to Go” will be in cinemas from January 11, 2024.
Here you will find content from third parties
In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
#Drama #Baby #men #carry #children