THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN: GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

The trouble with being withdrawn may work favourably for THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN, a film that was selected by the Melbourne International Film Festival director’s team, approved by the programming committee and passed by the Australian censor but then withdrawn because of what two psychologists who either hadn’t seen the film or had only seen part of it had to say about it.

Reported by Karl Quinn in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Dr Karen Owen, a forensic psychologist and former manager of Corrections Victoria’s Sex Offender Programs, viewed part of the film but said she was so disturbed by it “I ceased watching the movie and have deleted the link”.

The film was “just wrong in so many ways,” Dr Owen said. “Notwithstanding the artistic intent of the movie, without question it would be used as a source of arousal for men interested in child abuse material.”

Notwithstanding the artistic intent of the movie? One would have thought an educated adult would give some standing to the artistic intent of the movie. But then, of her own admission, she ceased watching the movie. Not a very forensic or clinical conclusion.

Dr Owen said the subject matter “normalises sexual interest in children” and would almost certainly lead to the movie being “used for arousal and masturbatory purposes”.

She added that images put to such use “do not have to be explicitly pornographic in nature”. Does she want to ban Lolita all over again?

Fellow forensic psychologist Dr Georgina O’Donnell, who has not seen the film but has considered detailed descriptions of it, said Australian Federal Police classifications of Child Exploitation Material included laws against depictions of real children, anime, cartoons, and the use of AI children for sexual gratification.

Had she seen the film, I wonder if her view may have altered. There is nothing explicit or gratuitous in the depiction, it is not dwelled upon or repetitiously revisited. The Australian Classifications Board has seen fit to pass it with an R certificate and adults have the right to see THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN (or not).

The film’s exhibition is restricted, only playing one screen at the Ritz. Will The Ritz be blitzed by the raincoat brigade? I doubt it.

Even though THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN is about artificial intelligence, its precedents are Pygmalion and Pinnochio.

The film opens with what appears to be a little girl reciting a memory by rote, repeating the recollection as though it is rehearsed rather than real. In short time, the little girl is seen floating face down in a pool.

She is plucked from the pool by an adult male, but not resuscitated, rather rebooted, for the girl, named Eli is an android and lives with this man she calls her father. She is Galatea to his Pygmalion, Pinnochio to his Geppetto.

Together they drift through the summer. During the day they swim in the pool and at night he takes her to bed. She shares his memories and anything else he programs her to recall. A cyborg clone of a missing offspring with memories that mean everything to him but nothing to her.

One night she wanders off, meets with calamity, is restored and recycled, made replicant of another child, a male this time, a cyber sibling to an elderly woman haunted by the untimely death of her brother, Emile.

Confronting, unconventional, conflicting, controversial, THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN is more exploration than exploitation, an examination of an idea of the future, and in this sense it is more of a fable than an actual depiction of technical reality.

Director Sandra Wollner and her co writer, Roderick Warich, take us on a mesmerising and murky journey through memories and imagination, engineering a strange reverie, delivering an experience not unlike those we have in our dreams, riddled with contradictions, voids and dark echos.

All external signs generally attributed to biological creatures, – gender, age, affection and identity – remain arbitrary, fleeting and fluid in the depiction of the android in THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN, and so the creature becomes a mirror, a reflection, and a reservoir for the humans, evoking another nod to myth, Narcissus.

THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN is more akin to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and Birth than Spielberg’s AI and provides an oblique, challenging and confidently confounding cinematic experience.