BIRTH (2004), dir. Jonathan Glazer This is my favourite film ever, and I got to see it on the big screen, on 35mm, for the first time yesterday at the Prince Charles Cinema. Putting a little something I wrote on my Letterboxd here: I kneel at the altar of Harris Savides, Glazer’s DP, responsible for the astonishing cinematography of BIRTH. One need look no further than the film’s ghostly colour palette and its chiaroscuro to witness his genius. Everything has an oily painterliness, a sense of decadence and patina, almost like a beautiful Rembrandt forgotten in some corner of a museum. BIRTH oscillates between this painterly interplay of light and shadow and something closer to tenebrism, the dramatic opposition of illuminated forms against vast expanses of inky blackness. Savides had a particular knack for making black seem blacker, lending the image an ominous strangeness that here only amplifies the film’s paranormal undertow. I kneel at the altar of Nicole Kidman, too, who delivers her magnum opus in a masterclass of subtlety, precision and control. The long opera-house sequence is chilling to witness on the big screen, allowing you to study her face at length and lose yourself in the nuances of every expression, every flicker of feeling she seems to suppress or betray, all against Alexandre Desplat’s monumental score. Glazer’s decision to explore the transcendence of love through this story is a brave one. The bathtub scene alone, which provoked controversy on the film’s release, teeters on the obscene, yet it’s this transgression that gives BIRTH its edge. What better way to convey the madness of love than to push it to a place where tenderness and something so unsettling become indistinguishable? Anna’s love for her dead husband has outlasted death itself, and her longing to have him back gradually becomes so consuming that she is willing to put her sanity, her entire belief system, and even the law at stake for the possibility of being with him again. So I kneel at the altar of Jonathan Glazer, too, for giving me this gift, but above all for giving us some of the most extraordinary close-ups of Lauren Bacall’s beautiful, ageing face. - @le__dauphin