__2021-1-31-12-14-54_original.jpg "d")
Films about reluctant couples having a baby are rare nowadays. The favoured flavor is fertility, or the search for it, as couples do their best to have babies in recent films like Only You and Making babies. Baby Done goes the other way, as a weird wacky couple Zoe and Tim are horrified to know they are going to be parents. You see, they are the outdoor types. They climb trees and cut them for a living. How much more outdoor can you get! Zoe played with calculated insouciance by Rose Matafeo says she will go bungee jumping even if she’s pregnant. No, make that BECAUSE she is pregnant. Understandably this doesn’t sound like a good idea to her partner Tim.
And they split!!! Wish we could also be rid of this couple’s eccentric iconoclasm. But Zoe and Tim won’t let you go. They are the epitome of coupled caprice. In the tradition of the rom-com ritual, they go their separate ways and meet only in the pregnancy-drill classes where Tim is now partnering another pregnant woman to her labour pains.
Forget the labour pains, this laboured comedy from New Zealand should have been aborted on inception. It plays on our instinct to dislike the pregnant woman to such an extent that she finally seems to represent everything opposed to the maternal .
As a couple Matafeo and her co-star Matthew Lewis are like two trees with branches that embrace when the wind blows hard. But that apart, they seem united more by their unorthodoxy than any genuine empathy. Still if you like your labour pains layered with weirdness this is your one-stop guide to perverse parenthood.
At one point pregnant Zoe invites her best friend for a threesome. Tim is as horrified and repulsed as we are. But does Zoe care? I have seldom seen a woman less deserving of motherhood. Zoe represents the bottom-most pit of self centredness. I was not the least convinced by her sudden surge of maternal emotions during childbirth.
Was she just faking it? To look suitably maternal on Instagram, perhaps? This woman is capable of any kind of charade as long as it makes her look non-conformist. Anti-abortionists would find it hard to sound convincing after meeting Zoe. Besides climbing trees, all she seems to care about is making people climb up the nearest wall. Her parents love her, though. If only they had used protection more carefully. We all make mistakes. But Zoe’s parents made a catastrophic mistake. And this film’s director follows closely.
Image source: Youtube/moviecoverge/imbd