Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is the whole world for her only child, 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler). Bespectacled, gauche and still partially unformed as a human, Lacy is fascinated by her casually magnetic mother, examining her hungrily and attempting to read her as if she’s a map to navigate the mysteries of the adult world. It’s an intense relationship, poised on the brink of change, with Lacy’s adolescence lurking just around the corner.
But it’s this sense of precious transience that makes Janet Planet, the feature debut of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, such an exquisite and treasurable account of a complicated mother-daughter bond. It’s a moment caught in the amber light of an endless summer in rural western Massachusetts. And if by the film’s close Lacy is starting to see her mother differently, she’s still not ready to loosen her clinging grasp on Janet, whose hand she holds when she can’t sleep, and whose hair she keeps as a protective talisman.
With Celine Song’s Past Lives, Tina Satter’s Reality and now Baker’s intimate but richly cinematic drama, it has been a rewarding couple of years for American playwrights turned indie film-makers. It’s not always the easiest transition to make, particularly if the film is adapted from a theatre work. The stage has a way of leaving its mark on a story. It’s worth noting that of these three examples, only Satter’s film had a previous incarnation as a play, albeit a formally experimental one.
And like Song’s Past Lives, Janet Planet is, one assumes, at least partly a personal work. Like her child protagonist, Baker, who wrote and directs the film, grew up in rural Massachusetts with a divorced mother. In 1991, when the film is set, she would have been more or less the same age as Lacy. With its child’s-eye perspective and the uninhibited, tactile quality of its camerawork, this is a story that feels particularly comfortable in the skin of cinema, more than any other medium.
Although this is Baker’s first picture, a fascination with film is evident in her past works. She won the Pulitzer in 2014 for The Flick, a play set in a run-down provincial movie theatre. A later play, The Antipodes, unfolds in the hothouse of a Hollywood writers’ room. Her cinematic influences are wide-ranging – she cites Eric Rohmer and Chantal Akerman as touchstones in her writing. Baker’s directing, meanwhile, calls to mind the work of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Janet Planet has most in common with Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, with its single parent-daughter dynamics and immersion in nature (Baker uses field recordings of birds and insects in place of a musical score). But more than this, there’s a space that both directors create around characters and action, a measured pacing that encourages us to grasp the seemingly insignificant details that mean everything once you notice them.
What Baker captures beautifully in this dual portrait is the unselfconscious weirdness of a child who has yet to encounter the crippling anxieties of her teenage years. Brought to life by an unaffected, finely wrought performance from impressive newcomer Ziegler, Lacy is an unapologetic oddball. She has some cherished private rituals: she sticks matted lugs of her hair to the wall of the shower; plays with a curtained box containing a tableau of figures that she decorates with foil wrappers and collected ephemera – her way of controlling a small aspect of the world.
She adores melodrama. The film opens with Lacy calmly telephoning her mother to warn her that she will kill herself if Janet doesn’t collect her early from summer camp. Later, she announces, apropos of nothing much: “Every moment of my life is hell.” She’s suffocatingly needy, a limpet stubbornly attached to Janet at all times. But there’s also a strength to her, and an assurance beyond her years. “So what do I do?” her mother asks, seeking her daughter’s advice on a relationship that has rapidly soured. “I think you have to break up with him,” says Lacy firmly.
But then of course Lacy would say that. She struggles to understand why her mother needs anyone outside the little orbit of their relationship. Over the summer, Janet, whose curse, she says, is that she can make anyone fall in love with her, cycles through all-consuming but short-lived connections. First is the boyfriend, tetchy divorcee Wayne (Will Patton); then comes Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an old friend escaping a bohemian theatre troupe that may or may not be a cult. Finally there’s Avi (Elias Koteas), the creepy-charismatic puppet master-director of the theatre troupe. For each heartfelt moment, each deeply felt confidence, each protracted embrace that Janet shares, there’s a small, anxious face in the corner of the frame, scrutinising her oblivious mother.
In one elegantly composed shot, captured in a triptych of dressing table mirrors, the frame is carved into three, with Janet in the centre and Lacy repeated, three sets of questioning eyes locked on to her mother in a multi-pronged inquisition. In its quiet way, the film seems to be working towards a tragedy that never quite happens, a suggestion that the suffocating symbiosis of this mother-daughter bond is not sustainable. But perhaps that’s a story for another film – and Baker’s follow-up to this tender, perceptive little gem can’t come soon enough.
