Ninjababy (Norwegian, Available On Mubi)
Starring Kristine Thorp, Arthur Berning and Nader Khademi
Directed by Yngvild Sve Flikke
Rating: *** ½
Talk about a womb with a view! Rakel(with a k not a q)’s unborn baby actually talks to her. Seriously! The kid(who remains a surprise right to the end when the gender is turned around) jumps out of the womb as a character in Rakel’s graphic sketches to remonstrate on how awful she is as a mother-to-be, forget how she would be as mother.
To be or not to be.A mother. That’s the question that haunts Rakel(Kristine Thorpe,masterly in her muddled views on motherhood) .Rakel is the kind of tantrum-throwing drama queen who would let everyone know she is not too keen on bearing the unwanted child.
The flow of feisty humour is so constant and so persuasive I found myself laughing at this pregnant oddity of a child-woman. Who can sympathize with a woman who gets herself pregnant , catches hold of the wrong man to be the father,and then refuses to own up to her responsibilities after abortion is denied?
Ninjababy so named because that’s what Rakel calls the baby in her sketches, is the kind of film we’ve never seen. Not in the unwed mother genre done to sobbing death in films as disparate in design and drama as Shakti Samanta’s Aradhana and Eliza Hittman’s 2020 masterpiece Never Rarely Sometimes Always where a pregnant teenager travels to New York to have an abortion.
Rakel in Ninjababy doesn’t have to travel to anywhere. Abortions are legal in Norway. The problem is ,she is too late in seeking it. This delay leads to typically tragic-comic interlude where Rakel loses her cool during a sonography. Like I said, the womb has never had a better view.
The hilarity is as cunningly lodged in the narrative as Rakel’s baby in her womb. It surfaces in welters of wacky plotting and an invasive intuitive relationship-perspective on the expectant mother and her unborn child .
Ninjaybaby offers a foetal attraction. It is at once perky and poignant as it trails its wayward heroine from a place of absolute irresponsibility- “I fucked with him because he smelt like butter,” she confides about her unborn baby’s possible father to her friend Ingrid (Tora Christine Dietrichson)—to a place of enforced self-searching.
Not that Rakel suddenly wants the baby after it is born; but by the end Rakel realizes that wanted or not, a baby is a new life being brought to earth by will or whimsy.
In the way Rakel’s repressed bohemianism is converted into a comic currency, Ninjababy hits all the right notes. However the two men who claim responsibility for her child—one a sensible polite martial arts instructor(Nader Khademi), the other an irresponsible unstoppable fornicator(Arthur Berning)—are portrayed in underlined italicized strokes, accentuating the only critically problematic area in films about women’s sexual freedom directed by women: the men are portrayed as redundant annoying imbeciles.