Three Birthdays – Review

This film was screened at the 21st Tallgrass Film Festival.

Sex is a thing most explore in their lives. It’s a direct and intimate procedure, involving honesty and trust and communication, and it needs to be treated with care. No matter how you choose to get down you still have to make sure everyone involved is on the same page. Not just physically but emotionally, mentally, and even spiritually.

Enter Jane Weinstock’s Three Birthdays, a film about sex and trust and relationship dynamics set at the height of the sexual revolution. Working through a story by showing us where each family member is at over…well, three birthdays, the film is a journey through the way relationships crumble due to a lack of honest and open communication in regard to sex.

Bobbie (Nuala Cleary) really wants to lose her virginity on her birthday. She’s a modern young woman with liberal parents who both teach at the local university. Her mother teaches courses on women and their newfound sexual freedom while her father is one of the most highly published history professors on campus. Bobbie has a mediocre, confusing time with her first lay (every teenage boy thinks he’s a god and each and every one of us was not), but the worst is that she discovers her mother (Annie Parisse) is having an affair. Her dad (Josh Radnor), turns out, knows about it because they’ve opened up their marriage. He’s not happy about her young stud but tries to keep it to himself, fearing accusations of misogyny within the household. All three begin to grow angry, resentful, and ultimately apart.

While the sexual revolution was an important turning point in 20th century America the contradictions to be found within are deeply explored by Weinstock, who directed for the first time in 1979 and is a child of that era. Gender politics will always be a topic of discussion in Western politics but taking a targeted look at this moment and using it to broaden our views of the current climate turned out to be a fantastic idea. It allows her to end on what feels like a high note even if we understand the darkness that is to come. I wondered throughout the film if it was fairly close to Weinstock’s own experience, one that ultimately led her here.

The tension ratchets up like a bowstring being drawn until finally there is a climax, both literal and metaphorical. Kent State is brought up multiple times in the film and most will recognize the dates as a build-up to a specific historical event, one that is held up as the violent growing pains that the young people are suffering at the hands of the elder generation. It doesn’t just apply to the military, but also to the sexually confused parents. These two teachers, each full of knowledge and personality, are reduced to an uncomfortable pair of people by their experiment. One refuses to acknowledge the issue and the other hides their pain until it consumes them. It’s a tough look at relationship dynamics and how we see what we want without honest conversation.

This won’t be a pleasant watch for many viewers. It’s two very misguided people refusing to believe their actions are affecting each other or their daughter and the tensions that arise when we don’t talk about things. An effective comparison to the murder of protestors at Kent State, who wanted their country to begin talking about things and got bullets instead. Three Birthdays is playing several games at once and I’m in awe of the fact that they landed so gracefully.