Cedric, the protagonist of Monia Chokri’s Babysitter, has a slightly crazed energy reflected in the film’s editing. In the first scene set at a UFC fight, he and a couple of friends flirt excitedly with a group of women. Their ribald banter is heard in a series of chop-chop closeups of each participant. It’s noisy, confusing, and disorienting, but the overall effect is at one with the atmosphere at live fights.
The match ends with a strikingly stylised overhead shot of the brawlers creating a bloody circle at the centre of the ring’s white canvas. It is far from gruesome, though. Chokri isn’t interested in the gooey spoils of masculine battles. It’s a different type of battle she’s after. And, even then, it’s never a life-or-death matter. The film’s central issue might make for screaming headlines and grave editorials. Here, though, it is treated lightly. Chokri, working from the adaptation of a play by Catherine Léger, also stars as the protagonist’s stressed-out girlfriend who is nursing their newborn. Babysitter will be well-received at festivals across Europe and North America and should have a place wherever the subject of man-woman relations are discussed.
A bit drunk after the match, our hero, Cedric (Patrick Hivon), spots news journalist Chantal, shouts her name, and kisses her cheek. She pushes him away and off he goes. But there will be repercussions. The video goes viral. Everybody says “I love you, Chantal” when they see him. He responds affably. It’s not a real problem. Yet.
Soon enough it makes a Canadian newspaper. Chokri’s deliciously wicked humour, apparent throughout the film, has it that the author of the article is Cedric’s brother, a rather righteous, intellectual specimen who wants his brother to own up to having committed assault. He’s the woke one, the one who takes it upon himself to explain to his brother and others the many problems he says every woman faces. It makes no difference to him that at least one woman he speaks to doesn’t agree.
There seems to be an unspoken rivalry between the brothers that may or may not be related to their attractiveness to women. The journalist succeeds in getting his engineer brother to pen a written apology to Chantal who, despite being the centre of the issue, hardly gets any screen time, a decision that in itself is subtle commentary on the handling of discourses of this sort.
In any case, Cedric gets suspended at work and his note of apology, now to be co-authored by his brother, grows into a book of letters to every woman he has ever wronged. To assist with his new baby handling duties while his girlfriend is out (she escapes from home by feigning a need to go to the office), he hires Amy (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a young babysitter with her own ideas about sexism, misogyny, and — in a scene that challenges Cedric, his brother, and his girlfriend — what constitutes appropriate outfits for work. The film’s plot may be light but there be many issues afoot.
Made in a world heavily shaped by #MeToo, Babysitter comes off as ambivalent regarding aspects of the movement. The film’s women are aware of their power; its men want to be woke but can’t quite get out of their own way. “If my wife exasperates me, am I a misogynist? I do not think so but how can I be sure?” one asks. If that seems like a question men have been asking since the dawn of #MeToo, it’s because there still isn’t a satisfactory answer.
Cedric and bro soon conflate commerce—a publishing exec says the book of apology is a potential bestseller—with social justice. And, as the minutes go by, it starts to seem as if Chokri’s film is a cinematic accompaniment to that much-discussed letter signed by Catherine Deneuve and published by Le Monde in 2018. None of it is treated seriously by Chokri, whose cinematographer Josée Deshaies and production designer Colombe Raby appear to have conspired to give the film the texture of a daytime soapy from another, earlier era.
“I can’t tell whether or not you’re joking,” one character says to another in one comically surreal but politically charged scene. That uncertainty is the ethos of this weird and witty film.
Director: Monia Chokri
Screenwriter: Catherine Léger
Cast: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Monia Chokri, Patrick Hivon
Cinematographer: Josée Deshaies
Producer: Martin Paul-Hus, Catherine Léger, Pierre-Marcel Blanchot, Fabrice Lambot
Production design: Colombe Raby
Production companies: Amérique Film (Canada), Phase 4 Productions (France)
International sales: BAC Films
Duration: 87 minutes
In French
