Clone

It takes a lot for me to drift off during the watching of a movie, but Benedekt Fliegauf’s psychological SciFi drama Clone has managed to do just that.

This dud of a movie was meant to propel former Dr. Who Time Lord Matt Smith to his big screen career, but if his first outing is anything to go by, then Matt had better remained in his Tardis…
Co-starring Eva Green (who seems to be cast in almost everything these days) the film is very atmospherically shot but that is not enough to grab the attention. Main problem is the movie’s snail’s pace (possibly even slower) and the lengthy and ‘stretched out’ scenarios through which the main protagonists seem to sleepwalk.

The prelude concerns the budding friendship of two children, Rebecca and Tommy, both residing in a bleak seaside town. That friendship, however, comes to an end when Rebecca’s family moves to Japan. Forward to the present and the meanwhile grown up Rebecca (Eva Green) returns, searching for her ‘lost’ childhood friend who now is portrayed by Matt Smith. This being a small place, naturally they find each other again and the old friendship is rekindled, soon leading to more than just friendship. Even that aspect is acted out painfully slow and with all the passion of a dead fish. One fine day, tragedy strikes during an outing in the countryside: when Rebecca needs to answer the call of nature, Tommy – while stopping the car - gets killed by a passing vehicle. Talk about dying for a pee!

Finally, the SciFi part starts to kick in. We find out that all this is set in the (probably) not so distant future and cloning is now common practice, although clones tend to be excluded from society like lepers. Yet, while visiting Tommy’s devastated parents, Rebecca puts forward her plan to impregnate herself with the DNA of her dead soulmate, thus ‘giving birth’ to him again – meaning she’ll be raising a Tommy clone from infant to adult and yes, the adult version is of course Matt Smith again. Utter weirdness aside, the film does provoke some interesting questions, such as the ethics of cloning in general, and why Rebecca decides on giving birth to a genetic copy when the copy will inevitably experience problems in society (question, how would strangers even know that the second Tommy is a copy?).
But there are no satisfactory answers or solutions provided, and this isn’t helped by a rather sedate performance from Green. Then again, given the fact that the story lacks any kind of pizzazz you can’t exactly blame her. Another missed opportunity is the strange mother / son relationship which isn’t explored from all possible angles. Also, Green’s character barely ages while her cloned son grows into an adult - this is seriously flawed scriptwriting.

Clone (originally called Womb) could have been a much better film, but the aforementioned slow pace and static scenarios quickly cause us to lose interest. It might have worked better as a stage play.