The Trouble With Being Born (Sandra Wollner, 2020)

The Trouble With Being Born is very reminiscent of Markus Schleinzer's 2011 film Michael, and I'm afraid that the comparison is not complimentary. Like Michael, The Trouble With Being Born takes on a taboo subject (child sexual abuse) but depicts it with the clinical, emotionally removed tone that has become a bit of a cliché in Austrian cinema. (Call it the "glaciation effect.") Sandra Wollner seems to want to complicate matters by touching on the ontological questions raised by artificial intelligence, a very au courant issue that has also become a hackneyed cinematic trope. 

Everything this film does philosophically is accomplished much better in Jessica Hausner's Little Joe. What is a human being? How are children defined, as autonomous subjects or as mere products of their environment? That sort of thing. Here, we have a bifurcated structure, where one AI robot (played by Lena Watson) serves as a substitute for the deceased family members of two different people. The first is a father, Georg (Dominik Warna), who regards the robot as "Elli," his dead or missing daughter. The second is an elderly woman (Ingrid Burkhard) how uses the robot as a surrogate for the little brother Emil, who she lost during her childhood. As if to drive home the point of technological interchangeability, Wollner makes only slight adjustments to Watson's appearance when shifting her from female to male.

But of course, things just wouldn't be complete without a little controversy. So in the first half, it is made quite clear that Georg is having an incestuous / pedophilic relationship with "Elli." He has taught her (or programmed her, perhaps) to affect a coquettish, flirty demeanor, and she spends most of her time swimming half-naked under her father's gaze. We do not see any actual father/child sex, but Wollner does not leave the matter ambiguous. Straight cuts take us from inappropriate cuddling and caressing in the dark, right to later shots that adopt all the customary cinematic trappings of a post-coital morning scene.

We never learn anything about any of these characters, so whatever pathologies Georg displays are purely theoretical. One could compare this to a film like Atom Egoyan's Exotica, wherein a semi-pedophilic relationship is articulated as the ritualized mechanism for negotiating the anguish of loss. But here, Wollner is content to just tease the viewer with the shocking lure of the forbidden, offering no mitigating circumstances to justify this transgressive maneuver. After all, we wouldn't want to disrupt the placid surface of her Teutonic formalism with anything as messy as human emotion.