School summer holidays can feel like an eternity when you are 11 years old, a limitless horizon of thrilling adventures and crushing disappointments, new sensations and shock discoveries, all set against the fathomless strangeness of adult behaviour. This is certainly how summer plays out for the quirky pre-teen heroine of Janet Planet, the screenwriting and film directing debut of celebrated US stage dramatist Annie Baker, best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2013 play The Flick. A modestly scaled indie sketchbook that falls just the right side of folksy whimsy, mostly thanks to a rich streak of deadpan humour, Baker’s highly assured sideways step into cinema is full of charm, if a little disjointed and underpowered. After well-received premieres in Telluride and New York, it makes its European debut at the Berlinale this week, part of a juicy package of titles that US indie powerhouse A24 are showcasing at the German festival.
Baker shot Janet Planet in the idyllic rolling woodland around her childhood home in Amherst, Massachusetts. The period setting, lightly invoked, is the summer of 1991, around the same time Baker herself turned 11, which suggests a degree of autobiographical intent in this delicately handled love letter to lonely single mothers, clingy daughters, and the unstable gravitational forces between them.
Despite Baker’s inexperience behind the camera, one immediately evident strength of Janet Planet is her seasoned skill at casting and handling actors, drawing fine performances both from total unknowns like Zoe Ziegler and from soulful, experienced players like Julianne Nicholson (Dream Scenario, Mare of Easttown). Ziegler is terrific as 11-year-old Lacy, a nerdy, solitary misift who craves unilateral affection from her acupuncturist mother Janet (Nicholson), and is not above threatening to kill herself when her demands are not met. Baker shows these mother-daughter exchanges in intimate detail: sweet yet stifling, often hilarious but not entirely healthy.
Three of Lacy’s rivals for Janet’s attention figure in the film, each introduced by Baker using droll screen credits signalling their entry and exit from the story. The first is Janet’s current boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton, who has previously worked with Baker onstage), a depressive divorcee who makes his antipathy to Lacy painfully plain. As a consolation prize for Lacy, he has a young daughter of his own, who becomes her temporary playmate during an exhilarating visit to the local shopping mall. But Wayne’s sullen, erratic behaviour soon becomes too much for mother and daughter alike. Exit Wayne
The pair attract their next random interloper at an impressively well-staged outdoor puppet show, written and performed by a local hippie commune theatre troupe with vaguely cult-like overtones. One of the players is Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an exiled Brit and old acquaintance of Janet’s, who is now in the painful process of extricating herself from the group after the collapse of her relationship with its guru-like leader Avi (Elias Koteas). Emotionally and financially drained, Regina becomes a house-guest to Janet and object of fascination for Lacy, who sees only a glamorous free spirit where adults might pick up more damaged diva signals. Much gossipy fun ensures, but rising tensions and prickly conversations inevitably sour the mellow vibe. Exit Regina.
The last of Lacy’s love rivals is Avi himself, who initially visits Janet to try and make peace with Regina, but ends up captivated by her host instead. They share meals and sunshine picnic walks while he mansplains endlessly about cosmic vibrations and universal consciousness. To her credit, Baker resists painting Avi as a sinister control freak, more a smooth-talking narcissist who enjoys the sound of his own voice a little too much. A fairly typical man, in other words. In one of the film’s more magical realist flourishes, Janet’s final summer fling ends with a cryptic, dreamlike vanishing act. Exit Ari.
During these odd couplings and brief encounters, Baker keeps hard narrative facts purposely fuzzy. By filtering each episode through Lacy’s 11-year-old viewpoint, the messy emotional machinations of the adult world remains a remote mystery. Typically horizontal and daydreaming, Lacy’s focus is less on other humans than on a rich micro-cosmos of lost earrings, kitsch ornaments, discarded sweet wrappers, bugs and flowers and tiny creatures. Baker’s superbly named cinematographer, Maria von Hausswolf, shoots these deliciously weird details in immersive, often trippy close-up.
An impressively crafted debut powered by strong and authentic perfomances, Janet Planet paints childhood as a series of disconnected sense memories and half-formed emotions. It feels slight and random at times, and a little overlong at almost two hours, but cumulatively adds up to a charming little midsummer dream of a movie.
Director, screenwriter: Annie Baker
Cast: Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler, Sophie Okonedo, Elias Koteas, Will Patton
Cinematography: Maria von Hausswolf
Editing: Lucian Johnson
Music: Joe Rudge
Sound design: Paul Hsu
Production design: Teresa Mostropierro
Producers: Dan Janvey, Andrew Goldman, Derrick Tseng
Production companies: A24 (US), BBC Films (UK), Present Company (US)
World sales: A24
Venue: Berlinale (Panorama)
In English
110 minutes
