Janet Planet
It is desperate when the young and mournful Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) worries if her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is still coming for her to take her from summer camp a day early. “I’m gonna commit suicide!,” she says. “If you don’t come and collect me, I said I am going to kill myself.” Janet ends up coming the next day, but this time around Lacy already changes her mind, “I thought that nobody liked me, but I was wrong.” To this, her mother only flatly replies, “This is a bad pattern.”
This is sort of a joke that helps to establish in the quickest possibly frame the mode of interaction between the two daughter of a mother always bounds to her through whom she does not know how to live and mother feeling unsure about the quality of her parenting skills. How long should a daughter grasp the mother like that? Should a mother rather be trying to draw back? Lacy is quite intent on looking at Janet’s face and the thick glasses that keep a little distance from her face. During the night too, she is unable to do without the help of a mother sleeping beside her. On this particular night, after the mother lies in bed, Lacy insists that before she gets up, Lacy wants to take a little piece of her mother. Janet takes out a pinch of her hair and gives it to her daughter, who keeps staring at the stuff possessively.
The film of Annie Baker styling herself as a director in her debut Janete planet is minimalistic and meditative in a way that her playwright works are.
A prize-winning American playwright describes a mother and daughter in rural Massachusetts in 1991 in webs of words harmoniously moving through grass and enormous trees planting a sound life for themselves. In the same vein, even the title ‘Janet Planet’ stresses the controlling aspect that Janet Dean has over Lacy & her world as her views of love, friendship & womanhood is based on the only person she has ever known Janet.
Nurse Janet is an acupuncturist working at home this type of work also allows soothing of her boyfriend. Calling Wayne (Will Patton) a man who rarely speaks and is very troubled; all in their relationships appear to stem from Janet’s position as a caretaker. This forces Lacy to wrestle with him for her mother’s attention and love. Rather James learns that Janet tends to go for the wrong type of men for her, and she does not know what and why this would be the case for Lacy. At first we are exposed to Janet from her daughter’s perspective and over limited spans of time intricately penned down by her aged 11 years round the clock. Actually three of them Janet, Wayne, and Lacy work as love triangle with Janet trying to balance the two out. Yet even under the mask she wears, disputes still arise, only that they are so mild they can go unnoticed by an outsider.
In spite of this calm aspect of their lives’, there’s a lot of turmoil hidden behind such quietness.
“Janet Planet” covers a couple of months into the lives of Lacy and her mother, with people coming and going to Janet’s orbit. During those little bits of time when Janet is not with Lacy, Lacy occupies her time with taking piano classes and placing her small figurine collection onto a miniature stage. The fact that Lacy does not have any friends is described as “a complete mystery” to her. But from the outside the answer seems obvious she is too much in love with her mother to permit any other person inside. And although there are episodes of the mildest tenderness directed towards her peers, the one highlighted being during her stint with Wayne’s daughter Sequoia, Lacy only really ever wants to play with her mother and other older women who nurture her strange creativity.
In the most active episode of the film, Janet and Lacy are sitting in the woods, where a performance wearing heavy costumes and delivering lines with those costumes is taking place. Janet has split up with Wayne and she is now once more a free woman. Janet and Lacy manage to experience the full extent of beauty of their surroundings in such a way that they can forget for a while their life, which is peaceful but often rather frustrating and experience something inexplicable, enchanting and full of promises.
This marking features a delineation of their mainstay how Janet flits from one lover to another and for a little while Lacy will sit. In between the two are small pockets of solitude where they huddle up to one another and comfort each other.
This genre accommodates many films focused on single mothers with their children, but one notable feature of “Janet Planet” is the way they visualize girlhood while watching one’s mother through the eyes of a daughter, full of fascination and equally compassion. In one of the film’s best scenes, concerted by Janet and her friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo), it is consensually high on drugs, both about to monologue how they spent their childhood and young adult phases of their life. Regina talks about the hardship of her childhood and a certain unfortunate letter she sent to her father which was about to change everything for her. Janet shares with us about her ‘Holocaust survivor father and angry mother’ and the dove which her parents got her when she was a child because she wanted a pet too.
It is a warm and funny scene about two alienated friends that strayed away coming back together, but the mood quickly changes. Janet starts explaining her choices and how there are some judgments by other people and herself on all her errors. Regina then tells her friend that she does not have to indulge in healthy and thick headism or reformist approaches to explain the ungodly mistakes she has made in romance and life in general. When the conflict is resolved, Lacy’s whereabouts is noted to be the very place where she has been seated secretly the whole time eavesdropping on the adult themes that were not about her per se but about her actions, Janet’s error. Because she is the end product of Janet’s decisions.
She has this perpetual power of being her mother and she knows it despite her young age which is a very admirable quality of hers.
Nicholson and Ziegler make achingly the best pair on screen as both perform with serendipity of joy, pain, reflection and compassion. The time one spends with them as an audience is like a coveted possession. Janet Planet creates that infusion of intimacy between women and girls that has been represented mostly in TV shows than films in recent years. This little family makes you feel like you have spent the whole season with them, yet it still doesn’t feel as if any time has passed at all.
The universe Baker sails for her characters is so luxuriant, so cozy and so pretty. By this time character actor Elias Koteas, about to appear as Janet’s (and Lacy’s) Avi, one of the many in the running for Janet’s affection, the picture is heading for what is constantly the most poetic, or lyrical, aspect of the film. It is dramatic in a way to see time with Janet and Lacy come to a close. But good enough Janet Planet is one place one is not in a hurry to leave.
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