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🎙️ EPISODE 501: 07.01.22
This film is broken into little chapters, more than twenty of them; they aren't vignettes, and it sometimes feels as if we've hardly transitioned out of one scene to the next when a title card interrupts. They're named things like "MOSES MAKES SPAGHETTI," "JUST ANOTHER DIAMOND DAY," and "WHAT THE DEAD SAID TO MILLA." It gives the film a bookish feel, but not in an obtuse or trying-to-hard way. It makes the story about a dying teenager falling in love feel casual, as if it were any other story. And that's the biggest strength of Babyteeth, Australian Shannon Murphy's debut feature: it both elevates and subverts what might have otherwise come off as stock melodrama. This is naturally aided by strong performances across the board.
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But — given said subject matter — this its still always teetering on Lifetime movie/after school special territory, kind of by default. But it never submits, and does so without leaning fully into art house mode. It lives on the margins and treats its characters as multidimensional, flawed entities and not caricatures of such, fodder for the easy-pickings dramatics. For example, Ben Mendelsohn’s father character
doesn’t have an affair with the pregnant neighbor; it peters out into nothingness, the attraction existing solely as metaphor: the inevitable loss of a child, the miracle of the creation of another. Even obvious, almost silly metaphors, like the titular "baby teeth," don't readily fall into the trappings or inspire an unavoidable cringe. It's all handled plainly and as is. Just like some gross-ass looking spaghetti or horse mushroom season. There is inescapable beauty in this world, the likes of which are sometimes too much to bear in their own right, on their own terms (music, love), but literally everything is beautiful. And in the world of Milla, portrayed with a real tenderness by Eliza Scanlen, that's what really matters, stuck there, at the end of her rope, far too soon, forced to experience moments of aging, moments of growing up, moments of life in rapid acceleration in this fateful search. But it never feels doomed or pointless, even the painful and fucked up parts. The "is" is all that matters. When you're given no choice but to push through in accepting a certain, current reality, it really can change the outcome on the other side.
Babyteeth is a 2019 Australian coming-of-age comedy-drama film directed by Shannon Murphy from a screenplay by Rita Kalnejais, based upon her stage play of the same name. It stars Eliza Scanlen (in her first film appearance), Toby Wallace, Emily Barclay, Eugene Gilfedder, Essie Davis, and Ben Mendelsohn. The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on 4 September 2019. It was released in Australia on 23 July 2020 by Universal Pictures and won nine AACTA awards, including Best Film.It was released on September 4, 2019.
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