Director: Shein Mezour
Writer: Shein Mezour
Running time: 1hr 37mins
A while back, I reviewed for IFL a fine debut feature documentary by Shein Mezour – A Dilo. A Dilo told the story of the eponymous anti-hero, a Good Soldier Švejk character trying to survive as a member of the Kurdish peshmerga battling the dark forces of ISIS. Three years later, Mezour has given us Carl Wood, a film biography of an eminent Australian scientist, a lead pioneer in the development of IVF (In vitro fertilisation) treatment.
War and peace. Two very different settings but what binds both works together is Mezour’s humanism – a faith in humanity and a drive to celebrate the uniqueness of two remarkable human beings. The serendipity of modern globalisation saw Mezour, a Kurdish student émigré at Monash University in Australia, make friends with Carl Wood who was nearing the end of a distinguished academic career – a friendship which led to the genesis of Carl Wood the movie.
A disclaimer – before watching the film I knew very little about IVF treatment and had never heard of Carl Wood. I suspect that many IFL readers will be in the same boat – so it might be helpful here to sketch out Wood’s achievements. Born in 1929, Wood qualified as a gynaecologist. After becoming influenced by the work of Carl Jung, he became a key figure in the field of psychosomatic gynaecology – a movement that aimed to move away from a male centred science of reproductive health to one that premiered the relationship between mind and body of the female patient. Wood took a lead role in the Australian family planning movement and in advocacy of abortion rights. A believer in working across scientific disciplines, Wood collaborated with veterinary science colleagues when he became interested in infertility treatment. Wood became globally famous when the collaboration led to Wood’s team successfully inducing pregnancy followed by the birth of a healthy child after the insertion of frozen sperm into the body of a previously infertile female patient. A first in the history of medical science.
Some achievement.
Mezour chooses to go for a full linear cradle to grave biographical approach. A large portion of the film is given to an examination of Wood’s family background and its very much medical milieu – father a gynaecologist, elder brother ironically a urologist, first wife a nurse. The director uses the standard talking heads format common to the documentary form. However, they are not afraid to innovate. They use actors to recreate scenes from Wood’s life. They use graphic artists to illustrate key moments in the story. I enjoyed the drawings by Raden Davis and Will Thompson and especially the work of the cartoonist Rodney James Port – look out for an extremely funny cartoon of the Pope, the head of the Roman Catholic church berating Wood. (Wood attracted Papal condemnation for their work on IVF and for their campaigning for women’s rights to abortion – as well as death threats from more outré religious fundamentalists). A nice touch was that Mezour was prepared to use scientific diagrams to explain human reproduction and the workings of the female anatomy.
As an intimate of their subject and as a student at Monash, Mezour had access to a vast amount of archive film footage of Wood and their IVF team at work – they use it well. There is a beguiling scene where on a voiceover Wood is explaining some breakthrough in the IVF process and on screen, we see them and their colleague Alan Trounson going about their business in the lab. As a total ingenue to the natural sciences, your reviewer did not know what the fuck was going on but Wood and Trounson came across as benign wizards at play – at one point we even see Trounson holding a glass flask with a mysterious vapor billowing from the spout. Beautiful cinema.
Some of the recreation scenes are well achieved. In particular, I enjoyed the scene where Wood has lunch with his somewhat combative elder sister – the sister turns up sporting a huge BAN IVF badge on their lapel. In the voiceover to the scene Wood praises his sister’s independent opinions and welcomed the challenge to his work and his own system of ethics – a great picture of science and humanism in action.
Mezour gives us some clips of a lecture delivered by Wood in retirement where he gets to poke fun at the stereotype of the laboratory scientist with some extremely funny observations about masturbation and sperm donation – these are well edited and round off the director’s portrait of their subject.
However, I had some serious problems with the movie.
Several of the recreation set pieces simply do not work. There is a long and ponderous scene in a restaurant which is presumably intended to illustrate what a force of nature a Hungarian colleague of Wood’s was. There is a Romany folk music trio playing and the actor in the role of the colleague proceeds to dance on the restaurant’s table-top. The scene goes on for an age and came across to me as puerile and embarrassing with a decided touch of ethnic stereotyping. We also are given a meandering account of Wood’s voyage to England on a cargo ship which seems to take as much screen time as the journey itself. Both the scenes add little value and should not have made the final cut.
As to Mezour’s approach to film biography, I gained the impression that they had been seduced as a friend undoubtedly would be by Wood’s obvious charisma and made the mistake that what would be of interest to a friend would be of interest to a wider audience. I felt too much of the movie was given over to the generally well achieved depiction of childhood and early career at the expense of a more in-depth treatment of Wood’s achievements in family planning and fertility treatment.
There is a strange lacuna in the director’s treatment of the latter part of Wood’s life. In a powerful statement in the credits Mezour informs us that Wood was inflicted by dementia and hints that his last days were lived alone and isolated. Mezour towards the end of the movie has Wood tells us about the breakup of his first marriage to Judith the mother of his children. We are then shown a short clip of Mari, Wood’s second wife, gazing wistfully at a horse over a fence without any further elucidation. The sequence left me with the impression that Mezour had failed to tie some important threads together here. Intrigued – I looked up the Guardian’s obituary of Carl Wood that claims “Wood married Judith, a nursing colleague, in 1957. They divorced in 1987 at the height of his celebrity. His second marriage, to Marie, ended in divorce in 2000. Two years later, when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, he moved back to live with Judith. She survives him, along with their two sons and a daughter.” Baffling.
Then there is the sound. Mezour tells us in his submission notes that the recordings of Wood that they made between 2000 and 2008 had been stored in a friend’s shed up to the present and had suffered from the elements. In the credits there is a reference to work on them from a sound production company – unfortunately there are times when the sound quality is not what one would expect of a cinema release.
The above issues aside, Mezour should be congratulated on giving us such a powerful and thoughtful portrayal of a great human being – Carl Wood is a truly humane text. I very much look forward to seeing what Mezour comes up with in the future.
Coda. Two texts have resonated with me in recent times as to isolation, ageing and the approach of death. Mezour’s lapidary statement in the end credits possibly fictive definitely ludic – “The last interview with Carl was in 2008. Carl lost his memory late 2009 due to betrayal, abandonment and poor meals provided by a diet company.” The other was a black and white photograph of an aged woman in rural China in her sparsely furnished living room – the only items of furniture a gigantic flat screen TV and an immaculate empty coffin. So it goes.