Janet Planet second look review: Annie Baker’s miraculous mother-daughter tale
Playwright Annie Baker’s quietly majestic film debut follows 11-year-old Lacy as she competes with new arrivals for her mother’s attention over one long, languid summer in 1991 western Massachusetts.
A special dread runs through Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, the kind that burrows into the mind of a child during summer, when oceans of time appear in place of the usual routines, and loneliness creeps in. For 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), that time is spent anxiously observing her mother Janet as she moves through relationships in their countercultural western Massachusetts milieu over some quietly eventful weeks in 1991.
Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker is known for being unafraid of silences and sparse plots, and her first film is daringly elliptical, the passage of time denoted through droll intertitles and muffled adult conversations beneath Lacy’s bedroom window. Seeing the warm, wide 16mm shots of the redheaded Lacy – dwarfed by verdant woodland and existential questions – it’s hard not to think of Céline Sciamma’s magic realist childhood fable Petite maman (2021), but Janet Planet turns out to be icier terrain.
We first meet the tween as she’s demanding, deadpan, that her mother rescue her from sleepaway camp: “I’m going to kill myself.” Janet (Julianne Nicholson), a caring and careworn acupuncturist, relents, exasperated to have lost alone time with her quick-tempered boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton). That night, Lacy sleeps in a beatific glow, arm wrapped around Janet’s face, engulfing her in a possessive little headlock of affection. But the film has enough empathy to go round – for a mother overwhelmed by a child’s bottomless need, and a child’s agony over the changing rules of their bond. Like Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance nue (1968), which Baker cites as an influence, it hangs on the ability of its child actor to communicate a complex interior life, and Ziegler delivers, unnervingly so. Lacy acts as her mother’s conscience: a watchful Jiminy Cricket surveying the world through big-frame glasses, chin tucked to chest.
Baker was raised in western Massachusetts, and her intimate knowledge of the place gives the film a vibrant specificity – in lieu of a score, sound designer Paul Hsu uses field recordings of the local chorus of cicadas. Even more impressive is the way Baker captures the area’s boho communal art scene, without seeming to poke fun. In an outdoor theatre sequence of folklorish papier mâché creatures, Lacy drinks in the goofy performance art with a face that says: this chaos is how the world should be. Baker respects the pre-teen girl’s affinity for the miraculous, communicated here through the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke understood that children get their bearings through dolls, finding wisdom in “the space between world and plaything”.
The puppets bring chaos in the form of Janet’s rudderless friend Regina (a mesmerising Sophie Okonedo) and theatre troupe director Avi (Elias Koteas) – Regina’s ex and the leader of what she swears is not a cult, though he’s prone to pithy aphorisms, and prefers to call his shows “a service”. An extended wide shot shows Regina and Janet having a long, sighing hug, with Lacy crouched at the side of the frame – a perfect evocation of that repulsion at seeing your parents display a vulnerability for which you have no road map.
Regina shakes up the dynamic by moving in with mother and daughter at their beautiful woodland home, which cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff films in a light-puddled, toffee-glazed sheen that blends with Lacy’s hair and Nicholson’s freckled skin. Its objects – Old Master postcards, a torn New Yorker cover – are lingered on, as if by a child with little to do. For Lacy, such objects become idols. At night, she arranges her troll doll and gaudy figurines in little dioramas.
Regina eventually outstays her welcome, and when Avi threatens to come into the fold as another ill-suited lover for Janet, Lacy begins prostrating to her audience of dolls – perhaps a ritual to rid him from their lives. A flash of the supernatural suggests she succeeded: Avi reads Rilke’s Fourth Duino Elegy to Janet over a picnic, and suddenly evaporates. But Lacy knows he won’t be the last – with each interloper, she learns she must carve out space of her own. If Janet Planet is about a marriage between mother and daughter, Baker’s transcendent summer tale unfurls as an amicable separation.
► Janet Planet is in UK cinemas now.