Berlinale “Janet Planet”: Berlinale panorama “Janet Planet”: Out of the shell

Who remembers the feeling of spending a long time away from home without your parents for the first time? Mostly in some kind of holiday camp. Some didn’t show any signs of it, took part in every activity eager for new experiences, others initially observed the scene from a distance until they thawed out and were thrown into the water with joy at the Neptune Festival. Still others were struck by homesickness immediately after a day. This new freedom felt very strange for everyone.

One of the children who has difficulty functioning outside of their safe space is 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) in Annie Baker’s debut film “Janet Planet”, which can be seen in the Panorama section of the Berlinale. At the beginning of the film we see the young girl at a summer camp on the phone, shouting to her mother on the other end: Pick me up now or I’ll kill myself!

It’s clear early on that Baker doesn’t want to give in to the clichés of magical childhood summer days, but instead wants to meticulously explore a close mother-daughter relationship.

Lacy’s mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), is a single hippie acupuncture therapist with a beautiful wooden house in the middle of nowhere in Massachusetts and a penchant for pleasing people (“I have a compulsion to make every man I meet fall in love with me”). . She is by no means a femme fatale for whom being desired is more important than a loving relationship with her daughter. On the contrary, Lacy and Janet often meet as equals. Janet doesn’t talk to her pre-pubescent daughter like a child, but often like a friend. This doesn’t overwhelm Lacy, it gives her an unusually balanced aura for an eleven-year-old.

The mother-daughter connection is interrupted by three encounters over the course of the almost two-hour film. The chapters “Wayne,” “Regina,” and “Avi” are named after people who always put Janet’s relationship with her daughter to the test. Wayne (Will Patton) and Avi (Elias Koteas) are Janet’s lovers, whose existence does not trigger any major upheavals in the mother-daughter cosmos, but does show what abysmal bad taste in men Janet has. Janet also asks Lacey for advice about whether the current relationship is still worth it. Ultimately, only the love between mother and daughter endures.

The script for “Janet Planet” lay fallow in Baker’s notebooks for 20 years. It wasn’t until 2022, in the middle of the pandemic, that she found time to work on the script during her little daughter’s naps. Baker had previously established himself in the theater world and won a Pulitzer Prize with the play “The Flick” about precarity and racism. The film, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado in 2023 and was largely received positively by Anglo-American critics, never really manages to get out of the starting blocks.

What the synopsis praises as Lacy’s subtly told emancipation story are sometimes chewing-gum-like, drawn-out shots that are intended to suggest closeness and that even Jim Jarmusch would be jealous of, but which do not make the characters any more accessible. Baker sometimes gets too lost in her love for the two quirky main characters (Baker herself grew up in rural Massachusetts; her parents divorced when she was six) without explaining her motivation for certain actions. Why does the relationship with Avi fail at a romantic picnic of all places? Being able to allow closeness hasn’t been Janet’s big problem so far. Why do Janet and Lacy never argue? Anyone who is so intimate with each other inevitably touches each other’s dance areas.

Nevertheless, “Janet Planet” creates a touching portrait of two people who share every thought with each other because they have a relationship of trust that can never be questioned from outside or inside. The camera by the Swede Maria von Hausswolff manages to highlight the differences between mother and daughter, something the script tends to neglect. Lacy can sometimes be seen in close-up from above, but only up to her nose (from an adult perspective). In the end, she is still a child with childish problems and her own answers: Where do I stand in the world, how do I differ from others?

»Janet Planet«: USA 2023, director and screenplay: Annie Baker. Starring: Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler, Elias Koteas, Will Patton. 113 minutes. Dates: Fri February 16th, 3:30 p.m., Zoo Palast 1, Fri February 16th, 3:30 p.m., Zoo Palast 2, Sat February 17th, 12 p.m., Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Sun February 18th, 6:45 p.m., Cubix 5, Mon February 19th, 6:30 p.m., Colosseum 1, Thursday, February 22, 4 p.m., Cineplex Titania, Sun, February 25, 4:30 p.m., International