The playwright-to-screenwriter (and, often times, double-dutying as director) passage makes sense with the intention of expanding. The make-believe world is no longer limited by the visible boundaries of the stage. Location can deepen and contextualize the story, cameras can frame the viewer’s focus, and fabulist elements may take place beyond practical effects. Celine Song’s successful foray into last year’s Past Lives was partly due to the multi-factorial attributes, such as the backdrop of international cities and natural lighting, that helped develop the headspace and journey of characters that are growing apart.
Annie Baker, distinguished in the theater world, may have dived into her first film, Janet Planet, with lesser ambition for technological advances and filmmaking tricks. It instead revels in the slow impact of memory conditioning at a meadowy area of western Massachusetts circa 1991. At this point of her career, any new Baker project will be worthy of attention, and for Janet Planet, there is a bright neon welcome sign for both old and new visitors.
The rules of writing still apply in either medium, and we are immediately drawn into the dynamic between 11-year-old Lacy (first-time actress Zoe Ziegler) and her single mother Janet (veteran actress Julianne Nicholson). After perceiving her time at summer camp as negative (“I’m going to kill myself if you don’t pick me up,” Lacy starts the film’s dialogue off in a late-night phone call to her mom), Lacy goes home to Janet’s pre-planned kidless summer, which includes being a homebody with grumbly boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton).
Remember the times where you are dragged by your parents to something that is clearly adult and definitely boring but you don’t wanna ditch because you know you’ll have fun with them once you guys finally get to do the fun thing afterwards? Janet Planet is a bit like that. The film is split into chapters based on the revolving door of people that come to her house: Wayne, Janet’s friend who is involved with a puppet theater cult (Sophie Okonedo), and the leader of said puppet theater cult (Elias Koteas). There is a version of this where Lacy could be having the time of her life, but we see that Janet’s going through her own personal reckoning: half-whispered musings about her desires while lying with Lacy, silent gazes across the screen. No doubt that Lacy will follow where Janet will go and Janet will do anything for Lacy, but they’re not exactly having a great time.
Sure, there probably is a good chance that Janet Planet could have been done on stage (though I’m not familiar with the idea of prolonged bouts of silence as a comfortable thing to watch on stage), but the filming aspect has the advantage of layering on a sensory-filled dimension. The 16mm adds a magical texture of childhood nostalgia, where I can recall the feeling of itchy weeds grazing the top of my shins and feeling dreadfully insulted that I could be bored on a sunny, warm day. The perspectives quietly switch between characters, but I found myself attached to Lacy’s childlike familiarity; one particularly cool frame positions Janet’s body both in and out of frame as Lacy talks to her while lying on the floor. This frame holds no significance other than the mere fact that a small child could only see so much, but might hold as a detail in the strokes of our memories of someone.
The fact of the matter in Janet Planet is that we don’t know what happens beyond the summer. Coming-of-age stories might have a more emotional or direct resolution, but Are You There, God? This is Me Margaret this is not. We don’t hear an inner voice narrative or see the present adult version of Lacy, but we can gather that she’s coming to an awareness of her mother as a separate being. Ziegler has a magnificent presence as a timid doll of her surroundings, observing but unsure. I know there can be discourse about how kids really look vs. what we see on screen, but Ziegler is certainly looks like the poster child of sticky limbs from melting popsicles and scraped knees, which makes her screen time in this meditative film more illuminating.
The film’s light and texture, thanks to DP Maria Von Hausswolff (also behind the diametric-climate opposite Godland) feels like a moving photograph, though Baker may feel less inclined to call this film entirely autobiographical. Whether it is or not, the intimacy of this experience will feel reminiscent of a summer that didn’t entirely go to waste, but isn’t something that could be quite explained vividly in the first day of the school year’s round of summer vacation summaries. If you were a city kid or someone who was surrounded by friends, Janet Planet may feel a bit alien. But, as Baker states in an interview, Lacy is around the age where you find that you are not the center of the universe. And in visiting her mother’s world, being an adult might not hot shit, either.
Janet Planet
2023
dir. Annie Baker
113 min.
Opens Friday, 6/28 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre and Somerville Theatre
