A slow-moving soap about a sterile couple’s quest to have a child, “Twice Born” uses the 1990s war in Sarajevo as local color providing backdrop for insights like, “Love only comes once. It moves like the sea, but it’s always the same.”
Penélope Cruz plays an Italian mother of a teen boy who, as we flash back to her visit to the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, hooks up with an ebullient US photographer, Diego (Emile Hirsch), and later marries him. The two are unable to conceive due to her defective eggs, so they hire a younger woman (Saadet Aksoy) to serve as surrogate, with romantic and custodial complications ensuing.
About the only reason to stay with this increasingly histrionic film is to satisfy curiosity about exactly how Diego will (as we learn at the outset) die, but long before we learn that “Twice Born” chokes to death on its own melodrama.