Director – Annie Baker – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 113m
**
Over the Summer, an 11-year-old girl abandons her idealised view of her mother as the latter traverses a series of relationships – out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, July 19th
11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) isn’t enjoying summer camp. So much so, that she phones home from the payphone (it’s 1991) to ask her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) to come and get her. That sets us up for the rest of the film, in which Lacy shares her mother’s house over the remainder of the Summer. During this time, her mother embarks on a series of short-term relationships, with the body of the film split into three sections, one for each.
First up is war veteran Wayne (Will Patton), a damaged individual who is around long enough to briefly introduce Lacy to his own daughter Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns). But then, before you’ve really got a handle on him, or his daughter, they’re gone from Janet’s life and so from Lacy’s.
Mother takes daughter to witness an open air performance by a bizarre theatre collective involving weird, archetypal, human-sized characters from homegrown hippie folklore (these scenes prove a high point in a largely uninspiring film). Janet’s old friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo), on the way out of a relationship with the collective’s leader Avi (Elias Koteas), moves in with Janet. Then, somehow, she moves on and Avi moves in with Janet, forcing us to reappraise his character now that we get to see him up close rather than a description at second hand.
Writer-director Baker comes to this with an acclaimed career as a playwright. Not necessarily, in this writer’s opinion, the best grounding for writing or making movies. Still, she seems to know how to cast a film, and child actor Zoe Ziegler who plays Lacy is something of a find. Janet’s character is that of a person who allows stuff to happen to her – she doesn’t ever feel like she’s in control, and as played by Nicholson, I found it hard to get a handle on her. The people who take up with Janet are arguably more interesting than Janet herself, but then they move on. Lacy goes through a process of disengaging herself from her mother, the centre of her universe at the start and someone she doesn’t look up to in quite the same way at the end.
For me, this was a film I found it pretty much impossible to relate to on any level. The little girl at the centre of the film is striking; the grown-ups around her, not so much. Maybe if it had been closer to my own background or experience, I‘d have fared better.
Janet Planet is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on Friday, July 19th.
Trailer: