Is there anything new to say about becoming a parent? Not really. But about 20 years ago it certainly looked that way. It was around the time feminism had gone mainstream, and also when newspapers began swelling in size and needed extra content, so columnists started writing a great deal about motherhood. They reported from the frontline of epidurals and breastfeeding as if it was breaking news, as if they were the first generation ever actually to give birth. This egregious phenomenon flew in the face of the wise old saying that your own baby is of course the greatest miracle, but no one else gives a toss.
Anyway, let’s hear it for the boys, who last night were the focus of A Dad Is Born, a Wonderland documentary about what it means to become a father in this day and age when men are meant to drop everything and muck in. Kira Phillips followed three Londoners in the period just before and after the birth – Jamie, a worried chap in recruitment who had force-fed himself on baby manuals; Greg, a gung-ho motivational speaker who had inseminated his second womb in three years; and Viktor, a Hungarian taxi driver (pictured below) who wanted to make good the sins of an abusive father.
Three very different blokes, all on essentially the same journey into impotence. It begins with an act of ultimate conquest, the male seed penetratively unleashed onto female terrain. It ends nine months later with mercy dashes to the shops for breast pads and nappies. Phillips shot the latter end of this castrating odyssey in the style of Molly Dineen, holding the camera and asking the questions, even at one point taking the picture of a happy family in the delivery suite while still filming.
There was some slamdunk material here, much of it supplied by Greg, set up as the ultimate power-jerk in his armless puffer jacket and orange baseball cap, doing trades on his laptop and Crackberry at the wheel of his 4x4. His other car’s a Lamborghini. “I should show you that,” he suggested, waving a metaphorical phallus in the general direction of the viewer. And he did. Numberplate: PRO5PER (= WANK3R). He manfully gave up the chance to make three and a half million quid in order to be at the birth, though one couldn’t rule out the possibility that letting the camera film his enormo-apartment and slinky girlfriend was in some way to do with building the brand.
Jamie on the other hand spent most of the film on the run, the camera behind his shoulder as he dashed for work or the supermarket. The body language screamed embarrassment: his sort of military-medium posho doesn’t do man tears or girlie documentaries. “Have the other guys you’ve been with gone through a similar experience?” he blubbered in a vulnerable moment. A naked attempt at deflection. From behind the camera Phillips turned counsellor: “You’re very eager to get it right and do your very best.” Not what you want in an observational filmmaker. She got so little out of him that she ended up interviewing a more forthcoming expectant dad she latched onto in the hospital.
Viktor was another story. A goateed pocket of livewire energy, he was the only subject remotely in touch with his feelings. The absence of a father figure in his life may well account for the flow of Mittel European nostrums - a woman’s place being in the kitchen; how in his former life he quite liked fucking anything that moved. Then in the delivery room nature took its course and we watched him slowly dissolve in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. It made the hour-long labour of this patchy triptych worth the slog. But hey, that’s childbirth for you. Nothing new there.
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