Janet Planet: a riveting tale of relationships with a dash of Grimm spookiness
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“A retelling of a dream.” So the fêted American playwright Annie Baker has described her understanding of how films work, as distinct from her plays, which carefully control how an audience feels time passing. She won the Pulitzer for her 2014 cult favourite The Flick, about three disaffected employees at a run-down movie palace; her follow-up, John, is one of the best things I’ve ever seen performed on the London stage.
That play was touched with a whispered sense of the uncanny. So is Baker’s tenderly mysterious film debut Janet Planet, in its bones a mother-daughter drama, set in verdant Massachusetts in 1991. Eleven-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) has begged to be brought home early from summer camp, and lied about the reasons. She changes her mind when her mother, an acupuncturist named Janet (Julianne Nicholson), makes the journey to fetch her, but it’s too late.
Over the coming months, they spend time together and apart in their giant woodland cabin of a home, while a series of lovers and interlopers pass, in chapters, through Janet’s life. There’s her hickish current boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), whose death Lacy wishfully invents when leaving camp; an oversolicitous old friend called Regina (a perfectly cast Sophie Okonedo), who’s part of a locally touring arts troupe; and Avi (Elias Koteas), a charismatic spiritual guru with whom Regina has lately been entangled.
The sensibility of Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women, Showing Up) feels like a neighbour peering over the fence at this project, while the treatment of a parent-child bond as its core, with other characters as satellites, might recall the likes of Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women. Even so, Baker’s tingling delicacy of touch makes it a subtly distinctive experience: it’s a film I already looked forward to revisiting while tiptoeing through it the first time.
This relationship has an ebb and flow that’s limpid, layered, open-ended, and like life. Baker’s intuitive way with her actors doesn’t disappoint: Ziegler has an owlish precociousness that’s beguiling in her hands – it never feels forced – while Nicholson, magnetic in her sadness, aces the very tricky feat of seeming far away and close at the same time.
Janet and Lacy admit to one other that they’re unhappy; more radically, they know it can’t be helped. This is an unusual coming-of-age picture for giving equal weight to their discontent. Baker lays out the pitfalls of adult living – romantic and otherwise – as a series of red flags for a curious adolescent who’s starting to migrate to her own gently rebellious point of view.
The setting has a spooky magic, like the setup to a Grimm fairytale: a doll at the house of Lacy’s piano teacher is Red Riding Hood, but also grandma, and the Big Bad Wolf underneath. At home, she arranges figurines on a tiny toy stage – a nod to one of Baker’s touchstones, Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander.
Lacy is, perhaps, a playwright in the making: Baker grew up in this very neck of the woods. It’s as if she has dreamed a version of her childhood again, and let us in.
Screening at the Berlin Film Festival. 110 mini; cert and UK release TBC
