The Film that Dared Ask the Unthinkable
Once the film Womb was released in the year 2010, it didn’t simply remain quiet, like most indie productions do; it made sure to announce itself to the world as a striking impression of meditation on grief, love and the cloning of a person. This Being said, the film, directed by Benedek Fliegauf, focuses on the character Rebecca, who decides to clone her deceased partner just so that she may spend time with him again after raising him to adulthood.
The film does feature Eva Green playing one of the most unforgettable characters in cinematic history, but her performance is not defined by her theatricality. Rather she gives a heart shattering performance, where she captures the unbearable feelings of love longing and obsession. That said, the audience was able to witness someone such as a partner in grief as well as someone with a clear apprehensive partner.
Rebecca’s Arc: Love Against Nature
Above all else, Rebecca’s character arc is one of the most unsettling in all of modern cinema because it completely subverts the audiences expectations of either a redeeming or downfalling journey. Rather, her journey is about the sheer persistence in maintaining moral ambiguity. There, she loses her childhood lover, Thomas, to an accident. Her grief is so overwhelming that she decides that cloning him and literally rebirthing him is the appropriate answer.
Motivated by what appears to pure love, a woman who is fighting against destiny is what Rebecca is perceived to be at the onset of the story. However, as the years go by, the story takes a darker spin. Rebecca’s decision manages to sink both of them into a tailspin of an identity crisis. To him, he is a copy. A copy of who? A copy of her needing to hold on to anything, irrefutably. It is a tale as old as time, and ‘an unwilling to forget is a strong clutch’ is the summary of both their lives. A life that raises him and a life that is still unwillingly caught in between motherly love and entrapment. It is a conundrum that both appalls and fascinates at the same time.
Extending the character arc, we see a clear resemblance to ancients tragedies, where love becomes the most powerful force that propels mortals to go against the natural order of existence. Orpheus is a perfect oasis when trying to grasp what I am trying to say. Orpheus, that in a bid to save Eurydice, he descended into the underworld. Or Pygmalion, who had a lover and out of pure stony desire, he carved her from the stone. Such is the case for Rebecca. She becomes a contemporary myth wherein she is a woman who bends existence, and reality, solely to clutch love with both hands.
Preparation by Eva Green: Stepping Past The Threshold of Ethicality
Merely dressing the part is far from enough for Green to deliver a well rounded performance. The character, Rebecca, appears to be beautiful and straight to the point; as Green herself has said, there is true menace in that calm contradiction. This is what captivated her the most. Her interviews reveal a woman that would describe herself as someone speechless with the intense quiet of grief and the irrational decisions that come out of it, only to appear vicious to the outsider.
Green prepared by reading books on grief psychology and attending therapy sessions to study mourning language. She analyzed mothers with dead children and reflected on the way the mind grasps the dead. This immersion is what infused her performance with such realism. She didn’t view Rebecca as a science fiction character. Rather, she viewed the character as a real woman who could have existed anywhere. This was a woman whose pain resulted in traversing a path that was unthinkable.
Real Life Inspirations: Grief, Technology And Ethics
Even though Womb is fiction, Rebecca’s actions replicate real life science and ethics debates. In the 2000s, cloning was already in the news and Dolly the sheep was a global phenomenon. She sparked a global debate that questioned the existence of human cloning and whether it was a viable idea. Rebecca’s story anchors that cultural anxiety and she represents the icon of science married to a human’s unfiltered desires.
On another level, the grief that Rebecca experiences is emblematic of grief that is innate to all humanity. It is a well known custom that widows, widowers, and parents preserve the relics of the dead. Historically, locks of hair, clothing, and even photographs were held sacred. Rebecca’s ability to bring back Thomas is an advanced version of that impulse. Instead of a locket, she has the ability to carry him in her womb.
Rebecca’s decision was tied to some critics’ suggestions of her story’s connection to European cultural concerns regarding ethical debates surrounding reproductive technology such as IVF and surrogacy. To an extent her decision is symbolic of real concerns about the potential consequences of technological advancements: What is the outcome of having the ability to rewrite the natural order of things?
Untitled: A Depressive Primer with Simple Aesthetics
Womb was filmed secretly in the windswept coasts of Germany and Denmark, which, as some members of the cast and crew noticed, lent the film an otherworldly quality. In keeping with the film’s serious tone, the set was, in their opinion, uncharacteristically still. Reportedly, Benedek Fliegauf asked the cast to restrain their speech, and to emphasize stillness, as well as physical gestures and facial expression as the predominant forms of communication.
Green herself found this both terrifying and liberating. In one story about the making of the film, she says, with some level of discomfort, that those segments of the shoot were particularly grueling due to the aggressive attempt, framed via the camera, to remove the layers of her self defense mechanism and what the world perceives as her own being. That same sense of exposure and fragility, she believes, is what the audiences were captivated with.
Responses from the audience were divided and contradictory. Many people were not in agreement about the same aspects. For some, the film was about the exploration of human desire and the various forms of grief that accompany it. Many people claimed there were certain incestuous notions within the film.
In the years that followed, Eva Green’s portrayal of Rebecca came to symbolize a cult phenomenon, not as something to be cherished, but rather as a specter that lingered around conversations of love and ethics in film. To a number of viewers, she was not a ‘character,’ but a reflection of their own contemplation on love, loss, and the moral quagmire.
The Legacy of Rebecca
Over a decade later, Womb was remembered less as a mainstream release and more as a cult favorite in philosophical and film academic circles. At its core, Rebecca continues to endure as a character who epitomizes the most perilous facet of love: its refusal to surrender to death.
What could have easily been a cold science fiction plot was transformed into a heartrending tragedy, thanks to Eva Green’s performance. Rather than carrying Rebecca as a villain or a hero, she understood the character as a complex individual making untenable decisions.
And that is why Rebecca- subdued, relentless, and grieving- is the most unforgettable character of the film. She transcends the boundaries of the Womb film, and epitomizes all the individuals who have ever uttered the words, “If I could bring them back, I would.”
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