“Baby to go”: Film »Baby to go«: Plastik Fantastik

One of Take That’s best songs says at the beginning: “We’ve come a long way but we are not too sure where we have been.” Feminism is probably similar: it has a really long, sometimes very successful path behind. But what else does he have planned? Sophie Barthes’ new film “Baby to Go” apparently brings a lot of enthusiasm to set the agenda here. No less than reproduction is the subject of utopian living conditions in her third feature film.

Utopia is the right word, because in contrast to many other cinematic and literary visions of the future, what “Baby to go” presents as a scenario is, from a feminist perspective, a real game changer and less of a gloomy end-time prediction like Margarete Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale”. . Because women are no longer doomed by biology to do much of the reproduction alone, but in the not too distant future, children will be bred in birthing centers in a plastic egg. What a revelation! No more vomit arias in the first twelve weeks (or longer), no more tiredness of death, no water in the legs, no 15 kilos too much at the end. Instead, just carry on as before: Aperol after work, sport, sex, career. The man, like the woman, can carry the egg around with him in a kind of strap-on Dederon net. But you can also leave it alone and just go see the thing in the clinic. So far it sounds fantastic for women: freedom to give birth for everyone. But of course this setting also has questionable side effects.

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Sophie Barthes designs an ultra-modern but hideous living environment for her protagonists Rachel (Emilia Clarke) and Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor): In the morning, the AI ​​decides what to eat for breakfast (coffee and toast, how boring, but one less difficult decision). Day); The New York penthouse apartment is a sterile nightmare in beige and gray tones, the work surfaces in the kitchen are free of clutter. There are happy lights in the office so that you can talk on the phone with maximum joy while doing pointless work (casting influencers) while you clock up kilometers on a treadmill at a moderate speed. Therapy sessions that replace something like a best friend are led by the algorithm Eliza, a giant creepy eye in the wall. To relax, people lie down in capsules with waterfall sounds and forest simulations that are set up in shopping centers, because nobody really has anything to do with nature anymore, except for the somewhat quirky Alvy, who has the strange profession of botanist and explains to his astonished students what nature is Fig is.

In any case, Rachel decides, without having spoken to Alvy first, because, as we know, he is more into the natural, for the sinfully expensive “Womb Center” (womb: womb), a kind of high-tech fertility clinic called Pegasus , after waiting on a waiting list for an almost endless amount of time. Like in the furniture store, Rachel can choose the color of her pod (all shades of pastel) in which the fetus will grow. The center offers the possibility of fertilizing the egg using female stem cells, which has the logical consequence that men are no longer needed for reproduction. Since women only inherit X chromosomes, only women would be born. Male offspring are only created if desired (if a sperm cell is supposed to fertilize the egg instead of the stem cell). However, this bombshell is simply rattled off in an incidentally staged dialogue and is not pursued further in the script. The amount of plot potential that is left behind here is almost scandalous.

The idea for “Baby to Go,” which was shown for the first time at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023, came to Sophie Barthes when she was pregnant with her daughter and was thinking about the topics of motherhood, commercialization and parenting. Many of her ideas can be found in the film: How does a partnership with a child change if the pregnancy is essentially skipped (and later breastfeeding no longer has the potential to put additional pressure on mothers)? What will happen to our society if women are able to make completely autonomous decisions about reproduction (assuming they have the necessary money)? What can our technology fetish achieve; where are the boundaries? Is the artificial womb, and hence its commercialization, a feminist act? What still defines people in an over-technological world?

A big, extremely interesting bargaining chip that the film doesn’t really dare to exploit at any point. Rachel and Alvy neither discuss in depth about equal parenthood, nor do they further explore the question of what exactly the class society will look like in which rich mothers can compensate for all the inconveniences of having and raising children with technology (an app controls the child’s sleep rhythm and lets it sleeping through the night), others are stuck in the reproductive machinery without help (in fact, a more complex version of what is currently reality).

The script (also Barthes) only tentatively discusses the price that companies charge for their supposedly emancipatory services (in the film, the parents de facto sell all the data that their child will ever produce to Pegasus; as a result, an entire policy area such as education is privatized) . Despite all of this, films like “Gattaca,” in which DNA analysis is so advanced that only “perfect” children can be conceived, are conceptually much more radical, even though they are over 20 years older.

“Baby to go” has enormous potential to address emancipatory questions with pointed theses (dictatorship of matriarchy, primacy of convenience, decoupling of women from motherhood). Instead, in the second half the film gets caught up in the completely irrelevant question of how the expectant parents can give birth to the child on their own instead of having it released from the plastic egg using a code in the Womb Center.

What Barthes does well, however, is to satirically explore the absurdity of hypertechnologization. In one scene, a man at the Womb Center’s open house asks with a serious face what the company does to keep the fetus in the egg from getting bored. At another point, Rachel dumps the baby’s food into the pod like fish food (she should be given different crumbs every day so that she doesn’t get fussy afterwards). But Barthes never consistently follows this path of exaggeration; instead, the film is a confused mix of comedy, satire and sci-fi drama that doesn’t develop any real dynamics because the strategy is missing.

In Take That’s hit “Never Forget” it says at one point: “With danger on my mind I would stand on the line of hope.” That somehow fits the film.

»Baby to go«, Great Britain 2023. Director and screenplay: Sophie Barthes. Starring: Emilia Clarke, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Vinette Robinson. 111 minutes. Start: 11.1.

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