FFF Review: FIRST COMES LOVE

Nina Davenport is a director of documentaries whose cameras point as much at herself as it does to her supposed subjects. They act like video diaries of the most personal kind. But her latest, First Comes Love, about her desire to have a baby--with or without a partner--puts a distinct twist on the term "navel gazing".

Her biological clock ticking and her love life stagnant, Davenport begins seriously contemplating having a baby on her own by seeking the advice of her loved ones. First she goes to her brothers and their families, then her close friends. Most advise caution, that the degree of difficulty (not to mention the financial burden) is high enough for two parents, much less a person on her own. But another friend says that her desire comes from one unambiguous place--love--and that the rest of it is just matter of basically figuring out the logistics of it. Even her parents are split on this prospect: her mother ever-supporting and her father constantly critical.

Nina eventually does come to the decision to have a baby and manages to convince her close gay friend, Eric, to reluctantly be the biological father of the child. A funny taxicab ride to the fertility doctor shows Nina repeating to Eric that she will in no uncertain terms oblige him to take any part in the child's life emotionally, financially, or otherwise.

The two other people who will play an important role in her pregnancy and eventual raising of the child will be her new boyfriend, John, and her best friend, Amy, who has agreed to be in some measure a second parent. It's a pretty touching relationship and in the absence of a live-in partner to help her with Lamaze classes and other prenatal care (her boyfriend lives in Los Angeles), Amy begins to fill that role.

Davenport is completely unflinching in the frankness of the toll pregnancy and childbirth has on her body. Without shame she points her camera at anything and everything and the squeamish will need to look away at certain moments. But in a lot of ways, this is less an exploration of motherhood or the sociological and biological desire many women of a certain age have to finally procreate than it is the difficulty of navigating the varied relationships said women have at that age. It's about Amy's and Eric's desire to have a life outside of helping Nina. It's about the strain the baby will put on her relationship with John. It's about the compromises her mother (who sadly passed before Nina actually became pregnant) was forced to make--not unlike many other women of her generation--and how that informed the unconditional support she gave to her daughter. It's about how her father holds on to his typically old-fashioned ideas of work and family and prescribes them to his daughter. And it's also about how all these people come together to help someone close to them raise a newborn baby--or steal from another adage, about how "it takes a village."