Watching Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, I was thinking about all the other films I’ve watched recently that rely on the perspective of children to tell their stories. There’s last year’s great Kaibutsu by Hirokazu Koreeda, which portrays a complicated friendship between two boys. There’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt by Raven Jackson, about the nature of memory, which manages the impossible and communicates how touch, sound and smell evoke reveilles of the past and connect characters back to moments in their history. There’s Les Cinq Diables by Léa Mysius, in which a girl with a keen sense of smell develops the ability to travel back in the personal history of her mother and aunt. All of these films (and to a certain extent Anatomie d’une chute) depend on outstanding performances by young actors, and a script that manages to communicate what it feels like to be a child. In their best moments, they capture the particular magic of imagination that can create a whole world (which isn’t that dissimilar from film-making itself): the nature of play and make-believe, but also the strange alienating effect of observing grown-ups through a lens that distorts them, or has to interpret actions and words imperfectly.
Janet Planet is named for the mother, played by the always great Julianna Nicholson, but it is told from the point of view of eleven-year-old daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler). Lacy begins the film at summer camp (it’s 1991, an aesthetic the film establishes subtly and perfectly), calling home threatening to kill herself if her mother doesn’t pick her up, because she feels like nobody at the camp likes her or wants to be her friend. Her mother arrives – the viewer gets the sense that she isn’t entirely surprised – and they leave with Janet’s boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), who Lacy is so disappointed to see still be part of the picture that she tries to change her mind about staying at the camp (also, in leaving, she has discovered that she was not as disliked as she thought). Back at home, in a truly beautiful house that feels more than just a setting in rural Massachusetts, the long summer continues.
These early scenes already establish what Lacy will later voice, repeatedly: she is a child who worries a lot, and thinks about how she relates or fails to with other people constantly. There is no real outside to her relationship with her mother – everything revolves around her (hence Janet Planet), and Lacy hasn’t yet found a group of friends to find context elsewhere. She seems fairly content with solitude as long as her mother is around, plays by herself, has developed elaborate rituals to keep herself entertained, and is otherwise kept busy with piano lessons and her mother’s friends and acquaintances, mostly consisting of outsider artists. They enter and exit in stages – their presence determines the structure of the film – and it feels like Janet’s exploration of her issues and self, explored through conversations with these friends and with her daughter, propel the narrative.
Wayne, a complicated man, introduces Lacy to his own daughter Sequoia, a rare sequence in which Lacy is seen interacting with someone her own age. They frolic through a mall together, and Lacy appears to enjoy this first attempt at friendship, but it is cut short because Wayne has issues (and never answers why he doesn’t at least live with his own daughter part-time). Wayne exits. Then Janet invites her friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo, always a delight) to live with them when she breaks up with her partner Avi (Elias Koteas), who is either a cult-leader or an avantgarde philosopher-theatre-maker (the outdoors play that Lacy and Janet see together is beautiful and strange, the costumes elaborate). Regina invites a lot of self-reflection in Janet, but is ultimately not the right person for Janet to finish her thoughts on her issues, instead superimposing her own interpretation on her in the wrong moment – this conversation is later finished between Janet and Lacy, with Janet revealing that the crux of her life is her conviction that she can make any man fall in love with her, which has only brought sorrow. Janet asks her mother if she can stop – and the final, strange vignette, after Regina exits and Avi enters, fulfils her attempt in a gorgeously strange sequence, in which Avi and Janet go on a picnic, but Janet returns alone, with Avi blinking out of existence the moment he is about to fall in love with her.
It's a difficult film to summarise, a film that is as much a study of people co-existing as it is a bewilderingly strange story about a child observing her mother, who means everything to her. She constantly watches her mother for clues, and Janet, just as constantly, analyses if her parenting is right – if Lacy should be sleeping by herself, if Lacy should have friends her own age, if she should be taking antibiotics for an infection. There’s a moment in the film when Lacy is bitten by a tick, and Janet runs off to get the tweezers, in which her loneliness feels absolute – and it’s one of many moments where the bridge between adulthood and childhood feels palpable (similar to when Janet explains cults, or when Regina talks about spontaneous combustion – it’s almost visible how Lacy adds these things to her repertoire of fears, rational or not, she doesn’t know yet). The little objects in the house, each having the aura of a whole history behind them, are just as much part of the story as the soundscape (the crickets or cicadas at night-time are as loud as a soundtrack would be). The film feels as tactile and visually beautiful as All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, capturing the overgrown nature of Lacy’s surroundings. A stunning film, an amazingly executed whole world.
2023, directed by Annie Baker, starring Juliette Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler, Sophie Okonedo, Will Patton, Elias Koteas.
