Birth at 20: Jonathan Glazer’s magnificent, misunderstood masterpiece

It’s the score that hooks you first in Birth: that light, sprightly, slightly anxious jitter of woodwind that trills over the film’s opening shot, as the camera tracks a man’s morning run through a snow-carpeted Central Park. For a while, the music follows the pace of his movement, lending this ordinary activity an otherworldly lilt – the whitened trees and paths of New York’s great green lung taking on the air of Grimm Brothers woodland.

But heavier orchestral intrusions threaten this rhythmic coordination between sound and image. Battering brass and percussion take over as the runner stalls, collapses and dies under Greyshot Arch; as we discordantly cut to shimmery footage of a water birth, the flute section picks up where it left off. Just four minutes into Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant, prismatic second film, one spell has been broken, and another perhaps already cast.

That editorial juxtaposition of a man’s death and a baby’s arrival – following a faceless introductory voiceover by the deceased, musing on reincarnation and his scepticism over the idea – is about as pointedly literal as things get in Birth, a metaphysical love story that proceeds to be both lucidly simple and richly, eerily elusive, in which everything is explained and nothing quite makes sense. A full decade after the events of that lyrically haunting prologue, Nicole Kidman’s brittle Manhattan widow Anna has accepted another marriage proposal; soon afterwards, she’s confronted by Sean, a pale-eyed, preternaturally poised 10-year-old boy who gravely informs her that he is her first husband, the man who died under that bridge, all those years ago. He knows her, their history, their secrets. He says she must not remarry. What’s a girl to do?

A film about belief and conviction and fragile purity of feeling, Birth is nonetheless built on a frank absurdity. Nothing Sean says can be true, except that it feels true at an impractical gut level. Glazer described it at the time as “a mystery of the heart”, an apt description for a story that moves with the irrational sweep and sway of love itself: like that swelling, uncontainable emotion, the film can sound sillier the more you try to describe or explain it.

Certainly, a number of critics thought so when Birth premiered 20 years ago, in competition at the Venice film festival: its press screening was greeted by boos and catcalls, which were far more widely aired that its appreciative notices. Criticisms of the nebulous storytelling fused with undue tabloid controversy over a shared bathtub scene between Kidman and her pre-teen co-star Cameron Bright to tag the film with that hasty label of festival failure.

The 39-year-old Glazer – who made his name with cutting-edge ads and music videos before delivering the sleekest film of the new British gangster wave in Sexy Beast – had aimed too high, too remote, too pretentious, and would duly be taken down a notch. Within reviews that were more forgiving than most, David Denby at the New Yorker deemed it a “bizarre combination of distinguished talent and inane ideas” while David Ansen at Newsweek declared it both “oddly unforgettable” and “hooey”. The venerable Stanley Kauffmann more damningly asked: “Were [the film-makers] and I born on the same planet?” and the film bears a 40% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Yet the film’s admirers were immediate and insistent, and on seeing it one suitably wintry afternoon as a porous student in a second-run London cinema, I was thrilled to find myself among them. The story struck me as no more daft than any other of love finding complicated, even delusional ways to endure in a cold psychological climate. The playful philosophical touch of co-writer and former Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière may be evident at the most outlandish edges of the narrative, but Glazer’s mid-development decision to concentrate the script on Kidman’s bemused, grief-raddled woman left behind, rather than Bright’s uncanny, possibly paranormal intruder, is the making of it.

Any interpretation of proceedings – the return of a reborn soulmate, the mind game of a disturbed child, or something in between – becomes moving when the focus is on Anna’s paralysed, internally inchoate response to it. She wants it to be true, and we want that want fulfilled: for all the outward chill of its mise-en-scène, Birth runs on a compelling spirit of emotional goodwill.

Whatever might seem unruly or unresolved about this adult fairytale, meanwhile, is held in check by Glazer’s direction and Kidman’s performance, the dual grace and rigour of which quite inseparably align in the film’s extraordinary, near three-minute centrepiece shot in a rapt, crowded concert hall: to a near-menacing thrum of strings, the camera closes in on Kidman’s stricken face, finely distinguished shades of terror, confusion and curiosity passing over her as she considers the possibilities of the impossible, maintaining her composure only in the sense that she remains silent.

It’s one of the great, searching closeups in all cinema: a couple of minutes that confirmed the actor, then already an A-lister and Oscar-winner, as a Streep-level conduit of unguarded feeling. Delicate but never vague, quietly alive to all the defences and untruths with which Anna arms her heart, Kidman’s performance in Birth may well remain the high-water mark of a continually intrepid career.

Related: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at 20: a love story that’s impossible to forget

As for Glazer, he’d brought vertiginous style and smarts to Sexy Beast – a film he hadn’t written, and one that today seems inconsistent with his interests and sensibilities as an artist – but Birth showed something of his soul as a film-maker, while also, somewhat conflictingly, revealing him as a ruthlessly precise formalist to boot. Not one hair, angle or frosty shade of celery green is out of place here: the late Harris Savides’s camera shadows the characters with equal parts intimacy and a stalker-like sense of purpose, while many a judicious cut lands like a bruising farewell. That opalescent score, constantly building and shrieking and shrinking and building once more, tells the tale as much as that spare, elegant script does: it was by Alexandre Desplat, not yet ubiquitous in Hollywood prestige cinema, his aural swerves and swoops still unfamiliar and unpredictable to us, and never quite matched since.

Twenty years on, greater consensus has built around Birth’s exquisite film-making – “exquisite” an adjective that should ideally cover both immaculate beauty and piercing, near-painful intensity, as it does here. And Glazer, in part thanks to the infrequency with which he works, has cultivated an aura of genius: earlier this year, his staggering Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest reaped all the mainstream plaudits and kudos (including an Oscar) that Birth was rather short-sightedly frozen out of in its year. But it remains a difficult film for even its fans to agree on: its splintered heart is both bleedingly open and hard to read, which is what keeps the cultists coming back.