Thoughts on "Le Premier Cri"

Oerall, Le Premier Cri was a hauntingly beautiful film. It followed women from around the world as they gave birth. The film was part-documentary, part-fiction. The women and their birth were all real, but they did not actually all give birth during a solar eclipse, as the film shows. The cinematography was beautiful and seamless--no hand-held home video feel anywhere. It was a documentary in the style of March of the Penguins or Babies or Microcosmos, in which the characters themselves tell the bulk of the story. There was no meta-narration, no talking heads, no interviews with any of the women. Just beautifully filmed scenes of the women living and laboring and birthing, with French voiceovers of each woman telling her own story. (The film has English subtitles for non-Francophones).

I loved the parallel editing in Le Premier Cri. For example, in the beginning of the movie, we see a Mexican woman swimming with dophins and floating in an azure ocean, an Amazonian woman bathing and swimming in a jungle river, and a French Canadian woman swimming in a lake. Then we see the three of them being painted. One has the baby in utero painted onto her belly; another has her entire face and body painted to beautify her for her baby's arrival, and another models nude for a group of artists.

The film follows women all over the world:

Majtonré, a Kayapo Indian in the Brazilian Amazon, is expecting her third baby. She gives birth in her hut at night, holding onto a horizontal wooden bar. Suspended in a half-squat, half-sit, she cries quietly in pain as the baby emerges. Her body is adorned with intricate patterns and stripes of paint.

Gaby & Pilar in Cancun and Puerto Vallerta, Mexico, plan ocean/dolphin births. Gaby lives near the water's edge. When labor begins, she floats in her large swimming pool. She plans to move to a nearby secluded beach for the actual birth, but the baby arrives too quickly. Soon after the birth, she is carried in a makeshift stretcher to that beach, where she coos over her new baby.

Pilar has her first baby in a dolphinarium. Two trained dolphins swim alongside her as she pushes her baby out.

Vanessa, a Quebecoise sharing a house in Maine with her partner and 8 others, have an unassisted birth for their first baby. Although their birth is without a midwife, it certainly isn't private. The commune members crowd around, watching her labor and birth.

Sandy, a dancer in Paris, France, is expecting her first baby. She continues to practice and perform into her eighth month. She attends childbirth classes, where they are taught how to push. Most women around the world, the teacher explains, don't need to be told how to push. They are usually kneeling or standing or squatting. But since most women in France have epidurals, they need to be taught how to push--and they way they are taught is artificial. Sandy wonders why she needs to be taught how to have a baby.

Mané, Touareg woman expecting her first baby in the Kogo Desert of Niger. After a long, hard labor, her breech baby is stillborn.

Kokoya, a Masai woman, the fifth of ten wives and awaiting her seventh baby. She gives birth in a desert hut in Tanzania. It is expected that she be stoic and express no pain.

Sunita, who lives near the Ganges River in India. She moved from the countryside to the city in hopes of a better life, but she is still poor. Pregnant with her fourth (and she hopes last) baby, she sells dried cow dung and her husband drives a bicycle rickshaw. She is disappointed when her fourth baby is born and it is a girl. Having a girl means needing more money for her dowry.

Elisabeth, a Dolgan nomad in extreme northern Siberia, is helicoptered into a hospital for the birth. She is totally alone. Her husband has remained home to tend their reindeer (who pull their small caravan like sled dogs). It is -50 Celsius. The attending physician thinks the baby is too big to be born vaginally, so she orders a cesarean.

Yukiko was herself born at Dr. Yoshimura's clinic. She had her first baby there and is waiting the arrival of her second. Dr. Yoshimura believes that modern living has harmed the birth process. Part of his clinic is a recreated 18th century Japanese house where his pregnant patients live and work. A firm believer in the natural process of birth and women's inherent ability to give birth, Dr. Yoshimura says that giving birth is like the sunrise--you can neither slow it down nor hurry it along. Yukiko gives birth to her baby girl on her hands and knees, in a dim room, with her husband and daughter at her side.

The last "character", so to speak, isn't one woman but multitudes--some of the 45,000 women in 2006 (now close to 66,000) who gave birth at the world's largest maternity hospital, Tu Du Hospital, in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. 17,000 of those 45,000 births were spontaneous vaginal births, with the other 28,000 babies born through forceps, vacuum extraction, or cesarean. This hospital is literally a baby factory, with almost 200 babies born per day. Women line the halls, lay side by side on beds filling room after room, give birth one after another in parallel delivery tables. Babies are whisked away by busy maternity staff, lined up in a central hub one after another in pink or blue blankets awaiting their processing. I have never seen anything like this hospital, not even close.

Zari was very disturbed by the scenes in which newborn babies were removed from their mothers. Of all the hospital births, only Sandy, the Frenchwoman, is allowed to hold her baby after it is born. Zari kept asking what would happen if my baby were taken away, or if someone had taken Dio away. I thought the stillbirth would be the hardest part to watch--the footage was mercifully brief--but I found these hospital scenes far more unsettling--both the separation of mothers and babies and also the lack of humanity and human touch in the Vietnamese and Siberian hospitals.

This is truly a must-see film. Buy it from amazon.fr, borrow a friend's copy, interlibrary loan it, request it for your birthday present...whatever it takes!