The Melbourne International Film Festival, Reviewed
The best, the worst, and the weirdest of what's coming to Australian movie screens in coming months.
The Film That Takes A Very Alarming Narrative Turn:
Nasty Baby, dir. Sebastián Silva
Starring: Kristen Wiig, Tunde Adebimpe, Sebastián Silva
Reviewed by: James Douglas
Sebastián Silva’s Nasty Baby is an amiably funny traipse through the lives of a group of coddled inner-city hipsters, until suddenly, viciously, it’s not. Silva himself takes centre-stage (his first lead role in any of the six films he’s directed so far) as Freddy, a Chilean artist in New York who lives in the bourgeois comfort of an airy, lush apartment with his carpenter boyfriend Mo (TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe).
The film begins with Freddy explaining his latest project to his sceptical gallerist — a cringingly misjudged video piece in which Freddy rolls around on the floor imitating an infant. He explains its real-life inspiration: Freddy is trying to conceive a child with his best friend Polly (Kristen Wiig), but, when they learn he’s shooting blanks, the duo turn to the reticent Mo for the necessary genetic material.
Like Silva’s most recent film, the Michael Cera-starring Crystal Fairy, Nasty Baby frequently feels improvised. But this isn’t the rigid comedic improvisation of directors like Judd Apatow, it’s more like a tool to enable his performers to be loose and naturalistic (Wiig, in particular, is as charming as she’s ever been), and lend his narratives a casual, unpredictable flavour. Silva’s forte as a director is the micro (and sometimes macro) discomforts of social interaction, and the film largely proceeds as a sly look at hipster mores, as his characters coo over the prospect of an interracial baby, continue work on Freddy’s video project, and embark on a feud with a local mentally-ill neighbour.
Then, in an alarming narrative turn that would be criminal to spoil, a serious moral conundrum rears its head, and the trio’s self-absorption is suddenly thrown into cruelly sharp relief. This particular development will likely be too much for some audiences to handle — there were a couple of walkouts at MIFF — but it at least offers the previously ambling story something resembling a point.
It doesn’t quite land coherently; the tonal whiplash is substantial, and although the performers are game, none of them really step up and make it work. This may be half the point, since the characters themselves are flailing.
At any rate, there’s a fittingly nasty double edge to this conclusion. Even as Silva pulls back the curtain on the awful capacity for denial that his characters’ hipster bonhomie conceals, he also exposes the extreme measures they’ll take to preserve the status quo. It feels like an artist blowing up his own work in order to escape from it, but leaving his creations behind.
For fans of: craft beer, selvedge denim, back-handed comments about Marina Abramović
Opening in Australia: TBC