Nina

Nina is about an infertile couple who court a lesbian to carry their child despite the fact that none of these people should be parents. It’s a story I’ve seen before. The film is way too long. That’s my main critique of the movie. Nina isn’t a wholly new story or anything that warrants a two hour and ten minute runtime yet here we are.

Lead character Nina works as a high school teacher and has a husband named Wojtek. The couple are having problems with fertility but desperately want a child. This leads to them looking for surrogates. None of this is done through agencies or official means, though. Instead, they just post on the internet. After a rejection there, the couple fixates on a young woman named Magda. Magda is a lesbian and isn’t overly thrilled by the couple’s plan. A main issue is that to conceive, Magda would actually have to sleep with Wojtek. This factor is perhaps the reason Wojtek is so interesting in surrogacy to begin with. Nina promises Wojtek she can bring Magda around to the idea. Magda is certainly perfectly willing to spend time with Nina when the issue of surrogacy remains muted. Of course, Nina ends up falling for Magda.

Nina never adequately addresses the majorly messed up power dynamic in the central relationship. Magda is in a vulnerable position and Nina and Wojtek either don’t notice or use it to their advantage. Magda is both younger and more financially vulnerable than the couple. She also retains a youthful wild streak involving partying and substance use. On the couple’s first meeting, they drink and smoke pot together. Because that’s really the state of mind you want to be in when discussing surrogacy. Magda correctly storms out of this scene but that doesn’t mean that the rest of the movie which is Nina borderline manipulating the still vulnerable Magda into a decision she’s not sure about is okay.

Man, this is a bad love story. To start with, Nina and Magda obviously have an insane way of meeting which is Nina is basically trying to convince Magda to sleep with her husband so she can carry his child. But hey, I’ve seen quality WLW romances with weirder set ups. But even once Nina and Magda are supposedly bonding, they have no chemistry. Even over halfway through the film, I couldn’t figure out how this becomes a romance. And honestly, it never really does. Nina is too tentative and Magda too much of a mess to really have a stable romance. So I ask, why did this movie need to be over two hours? There’s certainly not enough of this plot to warrant that runtime.

Sometimes, Nina is shot like a thriller. It feels like every few scenes, writer/director Olga Chajdas tires this character drama and adds random thriller elements into the proceedings. Discordant music and a really tense atmosphere sometimes inhabit scenes where it shouldn’t be, such as the first sex scene between Magda and Nina. There was no reason for that scene to feel threatening! But that’s true of most of the scenes involving this random, sinister energy. The film’s ending shows Magda and Nina reuniting in what I believe is a scene that’s meant to depict acceptance as the characters move forward. But the way it’s shot feels more like this is somehow Nina’s villain origin story and she’s gonna murder Magda as soon as the credits role.

Weirdly, the thriller scenes are the scenes that feel like they contain the most care and passion. Those, and the handful of scenes at nightclubs which feature really good lighting and are much more interesting to look at than the rest of the movie. This goes back to my complaint that Nina is way too long. There are scenes or individual shots that are beautiful and feel passionate but they’re cushioned by scene upon scene of unremarkable directing and story. Had Nina cut its runtime significantly, it could be a stronger movie. Perhaps then, the passion for directing would be more consistent and show in every scene in the film.

The final sin Nina commits is doing a particularly terrible iteration of that old trope of lesbian has sex once and then gets pregnant. In this version Wojtek has brought a drunk Magda home from a bar. She immediately passes out and for a minute I thought it was going to be okay. Nope! Wojtek gets angry and forces himself on the drunken Magda. Admittedly, briefly before he remembers rape is bad. Then, Magda decides this is a consensual sex scene now and gets on top. And yeah, this one night warrants the baby the whole movie was leading to. That’s lucky, I guess. This was a bad scene and I hated it.

Nina is was too long and doesn’t feature a lot I haven’t seen before. This movie is just two hours and ten minutes of people who really shouldn’t be parents. There are some moments of directorial passion and talent, but the over-long run time ensures that such moments are watered down to near nothing. This means that that my overall opinion of the movie is that’s it’s mediocre.

Overall rating: 5.1/10

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