Just a reminder. “Just a few thoughts” is a new, additional newsletter, sneaked in between my essays. It comes as it pleases and when I feel like writing it. Which is now. My regular good-old content will still be here, running swiftly to your mailbox soon. However, it requires a bit more work (and by a bit, I mean quite a lot), and it tends to be harder to find time in summer, somehow. Fall evenings are more suited for that than warm days when it’s still light outside after 9 pm, and my lactose-intolerant stomach hurts after indulging in ice cream all day. But do not worry! I have a lecture in works. Whether you like it or not.
“Summer lasted for years, now around three weeks”, to quote Taco Hemingway and Dawid Podsiadło. Although it may sound better in Polish (“Lato trwało całe lata, teraz koło trzech tygodni”). I don’t know what your childhood summer looked like, but if you’re a Pole born in the '90s, I don’t have to imagine it. The storms and sunshine, rainbows and fields covered in cornflowers, playgrounds, hopscotch, and elastics. Walking the woods path to a lake, making friends with kids from neighbouring cabins, learning how to play makao (is it seriously called Mau Mau in English?) on a wooden terrace, listening to evening rain, washing the campsite off the dust, splashing into the questionable quality of lake water from a rickety waterslide with flaking paint. Travelling to the Baltic seaside to build sand kingdoms, walking out of the sea covered in seaweed, eating tones of gofry (saying waffles doesn’t feel the same), and sending postcards to friends and family. Starting with the taste of Kaktus on the tongue and ending with the nose buried in the smell of new textbooks.
Details may differ, but the feeling of it remains similar for all of us. “Janet Planet” emanates it for almost two hours, and much longer after.
But scratch that out. That feeling is just a little supporter to the greater scheme of things, as silent and subtle, yet impactful.
Set in the summer of 1991 in western Massachusetts, “Janet Planet” calmly floats through the world of an eleven-year-old girl, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) and her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson). The film opens with Lacy being away at summer camp. She climbs out of her bunk, walks across a field, accompanied by crickets, up to a pay phone, where she serves one of the greatest opening lines, “I’m going to kill myself if you don’t come get me”. She assumed nobody liked her there, but then discovered she was wrong a bit too late when her mother came to pick her up. It is what it is when you’re 11, living a life full of discoveries - both of what buttons to push to move your parent and being constantly confused about what you really want.
Making friends doesn’t come easily for Lacy. But she sure does adore her mom. They’re practically inseparable. She feels the best when her mom is around, when she sleeps with her, when she can smell and feel her presence. And it’s not in a horror-like way, but rather that many of us would find familiar. As a child, my aunt called me a “cow’s tail” once because of my constant need to be close to my mom. In the film, Janet’s boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton) calls Lacy’s habit of sleeping alongside Janet “odd”. In the time she can’t spend with her mom, Lacy attends piano lessons, tends to a diorama she’s built in her room or travels to the world of imagination and observation. She carefully observes nature and people around her, even if she can’t fully comprehend all of it. (I’m also an only child who spent most of my time alone or with my parents at that age, watching tadpoles or catching snails that then I put into a container with holes, feeding them and observing for a few days before releasing them back into the vast world).
Lacy is more of an onlooker than an active participant in her mom’s emotional life, watching Janet connect with boyfriends and friends. There’s already mentioned Wayne, Janet’s old friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo), who’s just left a commune of actors that may or may not be a cult, and Avi (Elias Koteas), the leader of said commune. Each person’s arrival is announced with a title card, giving some sense of structure and showing how Lacy marks time. Janet’s relations are in the realm of adults. We understand it but watch it from the perspective of a child, sympathising with Lacy while feeling a somewhat familiar chest tightness set in nostalgia. The film’s strongest moments are when we see the world through her inquisitive (or bewildered at times) eyes and silences.
And in “Janet Planet”, silence is everything, thriving in the stretches of time between words. Annie Baker, whose directorial debut it is, has often relied her previous work on quiet. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright scripts the pauses very carefully and intentionally, including even how long they should last. Intentional to let the characters be, which has also been carried onto “Janet Planet”, where they often interact within spaces filled with ambience noise. And with small gestures and minor events, taking up lazy summer days, and shown with closeups, enhancing a child’s sense and observation of texture and touch.
Boyfriends and girlfriends come and go, but the heart of the film remains in the close yet tense mother-daughter bond. “It’s almost cosmic, the way kids start out as nothing more than a twinkle in their mother’s eye. Then they’re born into heavenly little bodies, orbiting the adults who made them like tiny moons, until such time that they overcome their parents’ gravitational pull”, Peter Debruge writes for Vanity. No surprise such a personal portrait of childhood as “Janet Planet” came from A24, the studio behind “Moonlight”, “Lady Bird”, “Eighth Grade”, and “Aftersun”.
Especially “Aftersun”. Similarly reminiscent, stunning, introspective - and also a debut from Charlotte Wells, focuses on a child trying to comprehend their parent. Both are set in the sense of nostalgia coming with a sticky formative summer filled with silent drama. But while one switches between its characters’ past and future, and the life-long repercussions of the father-daughter relationship, Annie Baker anchors her story in the characters’ present. Nothing happens in any of them, as some would say. Yet they’re both devoid of cliché with the level of detail and emotional load to their characters.
And they all feel like a second of full-blown summer to switch into an hour of the breeze of the last days of the season, changing tones in the air. Although such a description fits more to “Aftersun”, “Janet Planet” switches to such a feeling only by the very end. Till then, it’s sun kisses on the skin, wind fluttering mom’s long linen skirt, grass tickling the ankles, yet still with an intangible sense of summertime sadness. There’s nothing left for me but to quote Peter Debruge as he put it the best, and you can’t do much sometimes but to honour those having a better way with words than you - “Watching it feels eerily akin to running one’s fingers along a scar sustained in childhood and being magically projected back to the moment that injury was sustained”. A memory of całuek w kolanko.
I had the pleasure of seeing it at this year’s Berlinale back in February. Now, it’s in my four favourites on Letterboxd. It’s just had its theatrical release in the US, and the Berlin one has been, so far, the only showing outside the US. Watch your local(-ish) film festival programmes and cinema release announcements because, I both swear and beg you, you don’t want to miss it.