Sundance 2022 | Review: "Babysitter" Keeps Canadian Cinema Weird
8/12 ForReel Score | 3.5/5 Stars
Discourses surrounding gender can sometimes feel like they come at you in torrents, pummelling you at all angles, getting more distended and distorted with each new talking point. In many instances, they seem as if they might veer into the realm of the absurd and take you right along with them. Such is the sort of climate that is imaginatively depicted in the sophomore feature from Québécois director Monia Chokri, Babysitter—a whacked-out satire that plunges you head first into the absurd realm of our most absurd, gender-centric convictions.
Set in a bizarrely blissed-out suburbicon of Quebec, resplendent with manicured green lawns, white picket fences, and red roses, Babysitter charts the follies of one Cédric (Patrick Hivon), a bumbling, middle-aged man whose inappropriate advance on a female news reporter puts him under the scrutiny of the public eye and on indefinite suspension from his job. But rather than learn from his indiscretion, or strive to muster up a sincere apology, Cédric instead resolves to expand a written letter addressed to the news reporter into a misguided treatise on the prevalence of misogynistic attitudes in society at large. Meanwhile, Cédric’s wife Nadine (Chokri), still reeling in her post-partum depression, hires ethereal babysitter Amy (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) to care for her newborn, inadvertently (or maybe advertently?) throwing the household’s gender politics on their head.
Babysitter is a film about a world that feels upside down, balanced on its head, precariously close to tumbling over. It is a film that channels concentrated turmoil and chaos, not just in terms of the story it tells, but also in how it is constructed. One has only to experience the film’s opening three minutes, a barrage of rapid cuts, uncomfortably tight close-ups, and machine gun fast dialogue, to feel the feverish, erratic energy that will propel most of what unfolds. This first scene is all spittle, spilled beer, and slurred speech, as well as gratuitous shots of female body parts, delivered via a delirious montage—a gobsmacking thesis that lays groundwork for the brazen lampooning of misguided masculinity to follow.
“Society made me a misogynist,” bemoans Cédric in one scene, recalling to mind Alex Cox’s Repo Man and the dying crust punk Duke lamenting, “Society made me this way.” Babysitter strikes similar chords of glib parody, and while this places it firmly in acquired taste territory, those unserious enough to be swept up by the loony antics will find themselves laughing throughout. Sometimes, Chokri’s players need only to perform a cartoonish elongation of their vowels, or an unexpected twitch of their facial muscles, and the tone of Babysitter is thrown thrillingly off-kilter. The screenplay, by Catherine Léger, was adapted from her own stage play of the same name, and she has done wonderful work reimagining her own tale, to the point where it is difficult to see Babysitter as anything but a film. While Léger’s takedown of the sexes is not the most nuanced, the surreal packaging it comes in more than carries the film through its shortcomings.
Easily the most visually audacious of the Sundance films that I had the pleasure of watching, Babysitter is defined by a Technicolor-inspired, pastel-rich colour palette, as well as velvety textures from the 35 mm film stock. The makeup work makes everyone look impossibly perfect, and the production design is polished and homogenized to the nth degree. Anachronisms such as outdated technologies displace and disorient you, while an unhinged visual language of constant sight gags, often highlighting female body parts, leave you feeling whiplash. The way a breast will sometimes insert itself into the frame—it is as if the film is dictated by a horny energy that threatens to unspool its entire construction.
Like anything with a candy-coated, hyper-stylized presentation, Babysitter is a film that can quickly become too much for some viewers. Some will be inclined to write it off as over-exaggerated and grating. But for those who took to recent efforts such as Sundance alumna Greener Grass (2019), or even the polarizing The Love Witch (2016), there is a strange allure to be found in Chokri’s alternate dimension fairytale. This may not be the film that wakes up the world to the latent libido in Canadian cinema, but it is a bold and refreshingly creative vision, and I look forward to encountering it again in cult corners down the road.