Approaching a hot-button issue from the most suffocatingly narcissistic perspective imaginable, Nina Davenport’s documentary chronicles the plight of the single 40-year-old New York filmmaker determined to have a biological child outside a relationship—a demographic, in other words, of one. The director/subject uses a confessional tone, showing herself nude in the tub and slathering the movie in emotive voiceover. But her self-regard never matures into self-examination, and the only time she steps outside of her own perspective is to moan about how others have it easier. In one scene, a birth coach warns mothers-to-be that when their child is born, “a part of you will die”—the bit that makes people think only of themselves. Based on the evidence here, that part of Davenport is still very much alive.
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