Girl Clock! 2010

Christine, Veronica Neave, is a globe-trotting photographer whose life-long friends are Margo and Mikki. She is unenthusiastically dating Bob, Sean Dennehy, who welcomes her back by having them wax his car. Her idea of travel is Tibet, whereas he imagines a trip to Italy in a distant future, even though they’ve been together only nine weeks.

Back home in Australia, Christine works in Dave’s portrait studio. Shortly after she has broken up with Bob, she realizes she’s missed her period and takes a pregnancy test. It comes up negative, which she takes as a small relief. Yet she wakes one morning to the aching awareness that her biological clock is running out and that she really wants a baby. Having been a lifelong commitment-phobe, she has no idea how to sustain a relationship, yet she feels drawn to the idea of becoming a parent.

When she turns to her lifelong friends for support, she finds them also in crisis. Margo is desperately trying to hold onto her nest and keep her child-free lifestyle intact as Karla is off at university, while Mikki is consumed with battling the clock, aging, and the gravity that seems to pull her down. Margo’s son Simon has tried to return home after his girlfriend kicked him out, and though his initial plan is to stay in a motel, his room ends up becoming part of Margo’s art and yoga studio as he moves into Karla’s old room. Mikki’s boyfriend Tom has just moved in and is surprised to learn she’s five years younger than she claims, which makes her feel older, saggy, and invisible. Tom tries to lift her spirits with small, bright post-its left around the apartment.

After Christine accidentally kills an elderly woman’s dog, she visits the woman’s house and discovers she is utterly alone, with no children to rely on. Christine offers to help bury the dog and calls Bob to see if he’ll donate sperm, but the suggestion only angers him and pushes him to move on. Christine then wakes with night sweats and fears menopause; a medical checkup confirms she’s not sick, but warns that pregnancy could be difficult, so she starts exercising more and quits smoking, buying nicotine patches and a treadmill to aid her efforts.

Neither Margo’s husband, who can’t quite grasp her choices, nor Tom, who has had a vasectomy, prove viable options. So Christine undergoes a sequence of failed attempts to become pregnant. Finally, she walks into an IVF clinic and meets Paolo, a man she has bumped into several times. He donates regularly, and she spontaneously asks him to donate privately. He invites her to dinner, they go to his room, and she steps into the bathroom as he undresses. When she returns, he is dead.

Christine calls her friends over, and Mikki confirms that Paolo likely died of an aneurysm. Acting quickly, because syringes are in Christine’s purse, they extract semen directly from Paolo’s testicles and Christine reinjects it into herself. They manage to retrieve a substantial amount, leaving enough for two more tries. Mikki even gathers semen from condoms she finds in Christine’s bag, placing it in her own body to keep it at a suitable temperature before freezing it for future attempts.

A few days later, the women and their partners test for success. Mikki mentions that the material came from Christine’s bag, and Christine reveals she had poked holes in those condoms. They race to the chemist for tests, undergoing the process together, each pair facing an uncertain outcome and a shared sense of unease.

In the closing scene, the three friends and their two husbands share a quiet, sunlit moment as they push two babies in strollers along a bright afternoon street, a visual reminder of the fragile, complicated bonds that brought them to this point.