52 Films by Women Vol 8. 32. Babes (Director: Pamela Adlon)

 

Pictured: 'I took four trains to get here and we're seeing the movie.' Eden (Ilana Glazer, right) prepares the heavily pregnant Dawn (Michelle Buteau) for entertainment in the laugh-out-loud comedy, 'Babes', written by Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz and directed by Pamela Adlon. Still courtesy of Neon (US), Universal Pictures (UK)

The misleadingly titled Babes is a comedy about female friendship in which two young women support each other during pregnancy, one in marriage, the other outside it. For a film as funny as it is, it did not attract a wide audience. I put it down to the advertising: the thinner of the two women, Eden (Ilana Glazer, who co-wrote the screenplay with Josh Rabinowitz) stares at a positive pregnancy test while her friend Dawn (Michelle Buteau) looks on. If I take it at face value, so what? Contrast it with the poster for Baby Boom – Diane Keaton in a business suit holding a baby - where you can see the potential for comedy. (‘I can’t have a baby, I have a 12 o’clock lunch meeting.’) The image for Babes tempts you to scroll past.

Then there is room for misreading. One might conclude that the film is about a lesbian couple having a child. Glazer uses they/she pronouns, so the assumption has grounds, although, of course, gender and sexuality are entirely separate. In the 1980s, Babes might have signified a pair of attractive women – Demi Moore, Daryl Hannah - out for a night of fun rather than focussing on two women with post-sex anxiety. The film isn’t even about the children themselves. At any rate, it has proved a marketing disaster for Neon, who relied on the recognition value of Glazer (star of the TV series Broad City) to draw a crowd, not to mention the positive buzz that followed its SXSW [South by Southwest] screening in March. Baby Driver was also launched at SXSW and went on to gross $100 million at the US box office, Babes scarcely earned enough to pay its production’s medical insurance. (US box office gross: $3.8 million.) It is also a film where dentists identify as doctors, so it has its own recognition issues.

Nevertheless, I can see the film doing well in territories where it will be re-titled for language reasons (‘Help, I am having a corpse’s child’). Yes, people want to laugh at the stupid American who thinks you cannot get pregnant while you are on your period or else is willing to pay almost $500 for take-out sushi. That’s like your share of the rent, and you spend it on one meal? Still, New York City – even Astoria where the film is set – cultivates a certain form of insularity, providing a bumper harvest of narcissistic behaviour disorder. No wonder everyone is shouting.

While I can’t endorse the title, I can recommend the film which project-vomits laughs in its first twenty minutes. I can’t see anyone putting that quote on the poster, but given the regular advertising, it can’t hurt. It opens outside a movie theatre on Thanksgiving. Dawn, heavily pregnant with her second child, and Eden, who has taken 90 minutes on four different trains to get there and makes the point to declaim her self-sacrifice (it’s all relative), made it in time. Four changes of train? That’s not a trip to the movies, it’s an evacuation plan from Lebanon.

 ‘Are there tickets available?’ Eden asks. ‘Of course there are. It is 09:00am.’ Eden tells the ticket guy that this is her and Dawn’s annual ritual, and to keep his sass in the box. Or is it her annual sass and keep his ritual in a box. Ready with a tub of popcorn topped with gummy bears – not recommended for a dentist like Dawn, I should have thought – Dawn sits down to complain that every seat is wet. We know what this means as she continually shifts seats, but the film observes that women’s wombs become leaky water beds. But that’s OK, Eden and Dawn can skip the movie to have a last supper. Some time between 09:00 and 11:00 they are having a full meal with everything off the menu. Dawn draws attention to the leak and the waiter seeks advice from management. Finally Dawn experiences labour as a pain. The friends leave, Eden perhaps settling the bill. By the time they make it to hospital, Dawn is crawling, her pelvic floor is – well – on the floor. Then music kicks in, ‘And the world goes round’, written for Liza Minnelli to perform in New York, New York. The ’deafening sound’ and ‘kicks in the shins’ mentioned in John Kander and Fred Ebb’s lyrics really refer to Dawn’s yelling, but her husband Marty (Hasan Minhaj) is there, the baby is coming, and there is so much love in the room that who needs take-out?

So far, so high gear. Then Dawn decides that she would like sushi. Eden obliges and pays $473 for some to bring back. (‘Do I get a waiter with that?’ she asks the greeter at an upmarket establishment.) Eden pays in cash. ‘It’s all right, I’m a yoga instructor,’ as if yoga instructors don’t take credit cards. Maybe they don’t. However, she is denied access to the hospital. ‘I’m family,’ Eden insists, one of the film’s refrains. ‘Can friends be family without an ex getting in the way?’ That’s a misreading of the logline of When Harry Met Sally and there is no ‘ex’ in this movie. There is however The Omen. Eden has no choice on Thanksgiving but to eat sushi alone on the subway train. What did I say about insularity? It does prove to be a good way to meet people, wannabe actor Claude (Stephan James) holding the subway car door open for her as she packs up her ‘to go’ to go again.

That Claude is dressed as a concierge is not surprising: the film presents men as service personnel, ones that don’t get tips. Well, we never pay 12.5% to our actual armed forces. It occurred to me that single people are rude to their servers because they have no reason not to be. They don’t have to parade their virtue. Claude is charming and non-threatening. You can’t take a man seriously in a red bow tie – that’s clown attire. He and Eden have a lot in common – including a counsellor and four changes of train. Eden invites him back to her place. They finish the sushi and then give in to biological needs. ‘Let’s go ruin a towel,’ Eden announces after she and Claude kiss. Those who have ever entertained house guests will ruminate, ‘do you need an invitation?’

The next day, Claude leaves. The only souvenir Eden has is his bow tie, which surely belongs to the film he is acting in, apparently directed by Martin Scorsese. Babes is directed by actress turned director Pamela Adlon, the former daughter-in-law of German director Percy Adlon, he of Bagdad Café fame. Whereas Adlon collaborated with Marianne Sägebrecht, his daughter-in-law teamed with a woman who eats sour bread. Sometime later, Eden discovers she’s pregnant and wants to throw up while teaching yoga. I wouldn’t need to nurture a foetus to do that.

The rest of the film follows Eden in her pregnant state, stretching the limits of her friendship with Dawn. She tests the medical ethics of her shared counsellor by asking if they have heard from Claude whom she cannot reach either by phone, text or actors directory (I’m not sure she tries the latter). Eden’s counsellor isn’t non-binary, rather two men who dress like identical twins. The truth is shocking but logical. No man who had great sex with Eden wouldn’t return her calls unless he was literally a ghost.

In life, unknown forces don’t help you with your pottery, unlike in that Demi Moore-Patrick Swayze movie. Babes is rooted in observation. That Eden’s obstetrician (John Carroll Lynch) would wear a toupee and be self-conscious about it. That giving birth to one’s second child is only marginally less unpleasant than giving birth to one’s first child. That mother’s milk requires real work, even specialist equipment, and then can’t stop flowing, even through clothing. That after the birth of a sibling, a young boy wants to wear diapers again. That horror movies have a profound influence on young children, who decide to freak out their Hispanic Catholic child minder by writing three sixes on the wall. Eden has the key to Dawn’s house and wants to move in downstairs with her new baby. A line is crossed.

In real life, Dawn would understand that she has outlived her need for a close friend who is rather insistent on calling herself family. Single White Female was a horror film, after all. But somehow, the screenplay contrives to bring them back together for a ‘baby moon’. Eden’s birth plan involves dressing for a prom, a ritual she missed, assisted by a strict Eastern European doula, Dragana (Elena Ouspenskaia), who insists she has been a wet nurse producing milk for forty years. ‘Forty years?’ asks Eden, incredulously.

The ‘baby moon’ is a spa weekend that Dawn booked. However Dawn didn’t reveal that Eden was pregnant. So Eden can neither drink wine nor receive a massage – the masseuse is reluctant to apply any pressure that might endanger the baby. Cue the obvious response: ‘what about the bill?’ The set pieces have the ring of truth rather than contrivance, down to the building works that take place in Dawn’s apartment caused by clogged lavatory pipes. The smell requires sensory diversion.

Can Dawn allow her friend to give birth on her own? Will she abandon a single mom to the city? These are low stakes questions to which Adlon and her writers supply the answers.

The unfortunately titled Babes is funny and doesn’t opt for heterosexual love to give Eden a solution to her predicament. Eden doesn’t even re-model her apartment to welcome a baby. How cool is that? Her rejection of the baby economy is laudable, though one assumes that she doesn’t pay rent. Inherited wealth? As Donald Trump famously exemplifies, you can’t survive New York without it.

Reviewed at Cineworld Dover Screen One, Southern England, Monday 5 August 2024, 19:30 ‘Unlimited’ Preview screening