52 Films by Women Vol 8. 31. Janet Planet (Director: Annie Baker)
The principal
viewpoint character is Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), an eleven-year-old bespectacled
beanpole of a girl, who at the start of the film is sitting up in bed in the
dark in the left-hand corner of the screen. We can see the exposed bedsheet and
make out the parting in her hair. She is sitting up and has a plan. We next see
her slip out of a building, down a short flight of stairs. She then runs down a
grass verge towards a wooden building that has two lights shining out of it,
one at the bottom, one on the second floor. Baker holds the shot much longer
than necessary to the extent that we ask ourselves why. In the next shot, Lacy
reaches a payphone, puts the receiver to her ear, drops a coin in the slot and
dials a number. Someone answers. ‘I’m going to kill myself,’ she mutters. ‘If
you don’t pick me up from here, I’m going to kill myself.’
The next scene shows
Lacy in a group, joining in a song. She doesn’t look particularly suicidal. The
group leader performs enthusiastically, perhaps a little too much so, in a
scene that celebrates group endeavour, one of three set pieces that does so.
Baker likes trios, though not in terms of families. That said, performance is a
mask. It can bear little relation to your emotional state. If you join in a
song through muscle memory, you almost don’t have to think. You don’t have to
be yourself either. It can be a relief, but not always a pleasure.
Then we see Lacy next
to her tall suitcase on wheels, waiting. Lacy explains that her mother’s
boyfriend had a motorcycle accident, one of those excuses that requires no
further elaboration. The adult asking the question can fill in the gap, can
relate. A girl next to the adult looks at Lacy and gives her a plastic troll as
a leaving present. Baker films this scene from a distance, one of her many
telling uses of medium long shot. When she does so, it makes it harder for the
audience to read behaviour. Instead, the audience projects on to the scene,
filling in the blanks. We are introduced to Lacy’s mother, Janet (Julianne
Nicholson) through a reverse medium long shot. The adult asks, ‘is that your
mom?’ Lacy nods. ‘Should we say hello?’ ‘Probably not,’ replies Lacy. She runs
to Janet and embraces her. Then Lacy looks over Janet’s shoulder. ‘Why is he
here?’ She refers to Wayne (Will Patton) who is standing with his back to her
leaning against his car door. Wayne doesn’t want to intrude of Janet picking up
her daughter. We may also intuit that he’s annoyed. Standing with his back to
them is his way of defining himself as the designated driver, though when he
hears himself mentioned, he turns and waves. ‘I changed my mind. I want to
stay,’ Lacy sulks. ‘Too late for that,’ explains her mother.
Baker’s background
is in theatre, where a drama has to grab viewers observing it from the rear
stalls. In watching from such a distance, the viewer reads the whole scene and
sees but cannot fully read performance. Baker directs some scenes from Janet Planet as if the audience were in the back of the
stalls, forced to work on interpreting the action. Cinema is good at putting us
in the mind of the protagonist, but Lacy doesn’t fully understand the world.
The choice of camera positions reflects this, for example observing a character
through a screen window. Sometimes, Baker and her cinematographer, Maria von
Hausswolff (Godland), will keep the camera too close, with some
of the body off camera. In a car scene in which Lacy is in the backseat, we see
the curves of Janet and Wayne’s cheeks close to one another. Another technique Baker
uses is ‘now you see me, now you don’t’. A character in a scene will suddenly disappear,
replaced by someone else or otherwise has just gone. This reflects the adults
who are present then suddenly absent from Lacy’s life.
Lacy is undoubtedly
troubled, but she never explains herself. What we intuit – or project – is that
her uncertainty is based on her mother’s unhappiness. Baker provides some
biographical details. Janet had difficulties, but then she was left $30,000 by
her grandparents and trained as an acupuncturist. She works from her country
home in Massachusetts, at one point telling Lacy not to lie on the ground
because she might disturb her patients. Everything else about her is unknown.
We learn in the middle part of the film that she doesn’t trust her emotions. ‘I
believed that if I tried really hard, I could make any man fall in love with
me,’ she explains to Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an actress escaping an
unsatisfactory relationship. Such a belief is a tremendous expression of her
ego, a not so humble brag. Is Janet as wilfully childish as her daughter?
Baker divides the film into four sections: ‘Wayne’, ‘Regina’, ‘Avi’ and ‘The Fall’, the latter being a postscript. Each section ends abruptly, the first three with captions ‘End Wayne’, ‘End Regina’ and ‘End Avi’. These captions suggests that one part of Janet’s life doesn’t flow into another, rather relationships just stop, another articulation of ‘now you see me, now you don’t’. In two scenes, a character literally disappears from the frame. Lacy waits in a long line in a queue for ice cream, in which Regina is serving. Suddenly Regina is replaced by a white woman; we wonder whether race played in any part in this. We then see Regina by the side of a road, looking absently at a large barn, as if wounded. We don’t know if Regina is being viewed from Lacy’s point of view, but the child doesn’t try to get Regina’s attention. In the second disappearance, Avi (Elias Koteas) reads a Rilke poem to Janet during a picnic. He pays her a compliment – ‘I really like you, Janet’ – which is also a demand. She wants him to read the poem again (which he does). We then see Janet on the picnic blanket on her own, almost as if Avi hadn’t been there. Had she made him fall in love with him, which she recognises as a curse? Or as is more likely, had she been targeted by the charismatic leader of a theatre group for her vulnerability? We believe we know the answer. Her response (which we don’t see) is the correct one.
Pictured: Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) at home with a keyboard in a scene from the drama, 'Janet Planet', written and directed by Annie Baker. Still courtesy of A24 Films (US), Sony / Stage 6 Films (UK)
There is a third disappearance, that of the mother of Wayne’s daughter. (I did say Baker likes threes). We see a woman sitting next to Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns) at a table in the middle of a food court in a shopping mall. ‘Is that your daughter?’ Lacy asks, the other woman not being acknowledged. Janet, Wayne and the two girls share a meal. Sequoia teaches Lacy Pig Latin, adding ‘idig’ to words to obscure their meaning from those who overhear. The girls run through a shopping mall in a scene that is almost lyrical, passing a series of storefronts, none of them for franchises. Sequoia stands by a water fountain in the centre begging for a cash. The camera is at a distance; we don’t hear what she says. The girls then sit on the floor in a bookstore, Lacy reading aloud from Jean M. Auel’s ‘The Valley of Horses’, a novel set in the Cro-Magnon era about a young mother forced away from her clan and her child, looking for a place to settle. ‘I like Sequoia,’ Lacy tells Wayne. ‘I like her too,’ he replies. However, Lacy is a little too insistent when asking why Sequoia doesn’t live with him. Wayne has a son, who has spent time in Iraq. We sense that Wayne has some form of post traumatic stress disorder and imagine him meeting Janet as a patient. He yells at Janet to ask Lacy to stop looking at him. ‘Why is she here?’ Lacy’s curiosity is problematised. Outside we see Wayne act in a way that can only be described as exorcising his demons. It is followed by the caption, ‘End Wayne’.
Baker disorientates
us in the next section in which Janet and Lacy watch an open-air performance, a
cross between ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ – you
might call it, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Wild Thing’. Actors dress as creatures.
Regina holds a lighted orb – a lampshade with a candle in it – telling the
audience that ‘something is about to happen’. We have no idea what is going on.
At the after party, Regina and Janet talk, to the extent that Janet invites her
to move in. It is an arrangement that has some perks. Regina can spend time
with Lacy while she works, when Lacy isn’t attending piano practice. ‘Don’t you
have friends your own age?’ Regina asks. ‘No,’ replies Lacy. ‘Why?’ ‘I dunno.’ Regina
takes Lacy to an ice cream stand where she finds work. At home, the phone
rings. ‘Don’t answer it,’ Janet tells her, noting that Avi, her ex, wants her
back. Inevitably the two women argue. ‘You stepped on my feet,’ Janet tells
Regina, after articulating her problem and being summarised by her friend. ‘I
did it from a place of love,’ explains Regina. ‘You call that love?’ asks
Janet. The removal of pictures pinned to a wall, including a cover of ‘The New
Yorker’ magazine, signals her departure. A man carelessly rips the cover,
leaving a tiny portion taped to the wall. Lacy stares at it. Before then she
earned Regina’s ire by using her shampoo and pasting hair to the wall of the
shower. ‘Stop using my shampoo,’ Regina tells Lacy. Lacy denies it.
Pictured: Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) in a scene from the 1991-set drama, 'Janet Planet', written and directed by Annie Baker. Still courtesy of A24 Films (US), Sony / Stage 6 Films (UK)
In the final section of the film Janet is wooed by Avi. She also answers an awkward question from Lacy. ‘Would you mind if I dated a girl?’ Lacy asks. ‘Not at all,’ replies Janet. ‘I always wondered whether you might be a lesbian.’ Lacy is puzzled. ‘You have a forthright way of explaining yourself,’ she adds. ‘I wondered how a boy would deal with that.’
For all of Janet’s
enthusiasm about Lacy’s new teacher, Lacy doesn’t want to board the bus. Janet
phones the school, being told what to say by Lacy. Janet asks Lacy if she would
mind if Janet went for a walk with Avi, who by this time has come round with a
bottle of wine and told Lacy that she is God, describing creation as an act of
boredom. We join Lacy in rolling our eyes off camera. By this time, Janet has
diagnosed herself as being attracted to the wrong sort of man, which she turns,
during a walk, into a form of physical exercise, as if trying to train every
atom of herself to learn from her own mistakes. (‘My own liberation depends on
my willingness to put truth over self-image.’) By the end of the film, at a
country and western dance night, she might just have done that. For the first
time in the film, Baker speeds up the cutting, presenting Janet in a whirl. A
man asks Janet to dance. The child smiles. There is a possibility that the
psychic trauma that binds daughter to mother might be broken.
Janet Planet has scenes that put us slightly on edge,
such as Lacy covering her troll doll and other small figures with Lindt
chocolate wrappers, as if they were wearing hats protecting them from the
threat of a nuclear explosion. When she puts something – plasticine – in a
toaster oven, we worry. When she is framed off centre, so we only see the top
of her head, pouring milk into a glass to drink with her anti-biotic, we worry
more; the framing hints at a mess about to be made off camera. At one point,
she tells her piano teacher that she didn’t practice at all, refusing to accept
a compliment.
Baker presents Lacy
as a troubled but not a problematised child. Lacy is confronted by a series of
open doors but never quite steps inside. Childhood is like that; promise but
not fulfilment. Judging by responses to the film, there are plenty of audience
members who get Baker’s film. It needs a sustained theatrical release to build
on the word of mouth.
Reviewed at Finsbury
Park Picturehouse Screen 7, Friday 19 July 2024, 14:30 screening and Ritzy
Picturehouse Brixton, Screen Five, Tuesday 23 July 2024, 18:00 screening
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