by Jason Adams
Have you checked on a straight person today? I don't think the straights are doing okay, at least not judging by Babysitter, a Hashtag Me Too themed Quebecois comedy premiering this weekend at Sundance. Dubbed "screwball surrealism" by the filmmakers, which includes leading actress Monia Chokri (who you should recognize from her work with Xavier Dolan) in the director's chair, this movie plays like somebody stuffed a classic French farce into a blender, right down to the wee-wee maid's uniform. It is a lot, too much, and not enough all at once. Tres exhausting!
It all begins with a drunken boys night out at a boxing match. Or at least I think it does...
The editing doesn't hold any of the shots in this sequence, which mostly consist of extreme close-ups of 1) drunken people yelling at each other and 2) women's cleavage, for any longer than a couple of seconds, forcing me to half-watch the film's first twenty minutes through my fingers. If the intention is to induce queasiness to go along with the drunken asshole antics then Mission Accomplished, but to what end? I know what it's like to be fall-down drunk and nobody is signing up for that experience in 4DX.
Anyway one of the drunk dudes is named Cédric (Patrick Hivon), and in the middle of his revelry he accosts a female news reporter reporting from the stadium by kissing her live on the air, becoming insta-infamous for it. His workplace suspends him the very next day, and he suddenly finds himself forced to be a stay-at-home dad with a newborn and his dazed and unhappy girlfriend Nadine (Chokri) glaring back at him with ever increasing exasperation.
His brother, a windbag author and self-proclaimed feminist named Jean-Michel (Steve Laplante), decides Cédric must see the error of his ways, and so together they set out to write a book of apologies to all the women in the world. And freshly distracted with his new pet project, Cédric manages the "stay-at-home dad" thing for all of five minutes before he decides to hire a babysitter -- enter a cooing blonde whirlwind named Amy (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), who loves to role-play whatever role anybody needs her to be.
While the editing in the film thankfully mostly calms down at by mid-point, the forced wackiness of everything from the costumes to the performances never stops galloping at full-speed -- that said there are some really spectacular candy-colored visuals that cinematographer Josée Deshaies (who also shot Saint Laurent, so duh) sneaks in, when the pacing takes a moment to let us look at them anyway. The film has a hazy 70s Douche and Menthol Cigarettes advertisement feel happening that reminded me of the work of Peter Strickland. But where Strickland's films (especially The Duke of Burgundy) come across poisonous dangerous oddities that wear satire and heart-felt affection at equal measure on their sleeves, Babysitter is as scatter-brained as a paint-ball massacre in a sheet factory. All pop pop pops of color, flapping limply in the fragrant commercial breeze.
Cédric is a yutz and his hypociritcal brother's even worse, but the two women thrashing beside them are hardly any better. Everyone except the babysitter is mid-life-cirising themselves into knots while Amy, a reflection of all of their wants and desires, remains inscrutable but not in a facinating way -- this is less Terence Stamp in Teorema than it is Alicia Silverstone in Crush. Anyway when a film actively hates its characters this much I have a hard time not just nodding along, nodding off, checking out.