#GlynisBell

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Thoughts : Shiva Baby (2021)

It’s getting to be crunch time for the 2021 film release calendar (though, as always, there is a slate of releases around the Christmas season that are intriguing).  Luckily, as someone who shares social media space with other film lovers, we’re getting to the point that people are starting to share their top of the year lists, which subsequently means that I get reminders about films I overlooked or forgot about.  This is exactly what happened recently when my friend Brent had Shiva Baby on his list of top 2021 films.  I remember this one coming out, but never got around to seeing it, but thanks to HBOMax, I got to remedy that problem.

Like a film straight from the 1950s, albeit with updated content and context, Shiva Baby plays like a comedy of errors with a plethora of skeletons in the closet as the protagonist ammunition.  Danielle, despite her youth (meant to be read as innocent ignorance), is positioned as a fabulously flawed protagonist, and during the midst of the Shiva that takes place we are served a healthy heaping of family issues, old relationships that are frowned upon by parents and family friend, and perhaps most pressing, an ongoing illicit affair that holds its own batch of surprises in tandem.  The core conflict becomes a triangle with family issues as the foundation that distracts from and supports the main pillars : Maya’s feelings for Danielle that were put on hold, and Max’s sugar daddy status to Danielle in spite of the fact that he is married with a second child on the horizon.  With these tension-filled supports in place, a whirlwind of toxic flirtation emerges, with participants on all sides playing hot and cold constantly against one another based on whatever the latest revelation they face may be.

With this conflict structure in place, the focus on Danielle and her protagonist journey becomes a cautionary tale about seeding lies in your life, and how fierce the reckoning can be once those seeds grow into a karmic tree.  Despite Danielle’s frustrations with her parents, it would be unfair to pin her habitual lying on them, as Debbie is not afraid to be blunt with Danielle due to her sharp honesty, and Joel serves as a sort of security blanket via his “awe shucks” approach to life and socializing.  It would also be easy to pin Danielle’s lying practices on her dissolved relationship with Maya, but that would be unfair to Maya, as she too seems to be a calming and supportive force in Danielle’s life that was pushed to the wayside.  As her interaction with Max stands as only the latest in a long line of inward and outward facing lies, we quickly surmise that Danielle is the epicenter of her problems, and has buried herself under a mountain of lies, mistruths and half-truths that she can no longer keep track of or micromanage in the hopes of not succumbing to them in a world-shattering breakdown.

One huge positive factor that Shiva Baby has going for it is the measured use of wonderfully expressive scoring, specifically that of a 1950s horror film, which helps ratchet up the tension to comically uncomfortable levels.  The cinematography helps emulate how packed and intrusively intimate the Shiva is, especially the way that it hops in-between the different character perspectives to create sightlines full of subtext that are noticed by other in-film characters the way we notice them.  In terms of sound design, we get glimpses of the Robert Altman layered dialogue style phased in and out to separate the extremely revealing conversations that Danielle is forced to endure.  Writer and director Emma Seligman’s writing is extremely confident in the way that it balances relatable drama with comedy that will surely unveil surprise after surprise upon repeat viewing, particularly once a viewer is familiar with the large scale game of romantic chess the main three leads play.  Intentional or not, Seligman and crew seem to opt for natural light rather than manufactured light, giving the film a hefty sense of reality to the point where it would almost feel like a documentary if it weren’t so stylized and precisely edited.

Rachel Sennott is hilariously awkward the way that she attempts to stay dignified in the face of an onslaught of lies, lustful urges on multiple fronts and overbearing volumes of communication from close friends and family, all the while staying so self-centered in the midst of the grieving that her role as protagonist is wonderfully challenging for a viewer.  Molly Gordon holds in the angst of unrequited love that many see in a negative light, making many of her observations and questions comically loaded as we root for her in the tug of war she plays with Danny Defarrari, who is equally funny with his opposite hot and cold energy directed at the Danielle character.  Polly Draper and Fred Melamed make a wonderful couple, with Draper clearly being the one in charge while Melamed acquiesces to her take charge nature and bolsters the family image with magnetic charm.  Dianna Argon gladly steps into the role of ticking time bomb, using her piercing stare and quiet judgement to fuel the blow-up audiences are both expecting and dreading.  The Shiva is full of wonderful supporting characters portrayed by the likes of Jackie Hoffman, Cilda Shaur, Glynis Bell, Sondra James, Deborah Offner, Vivien Landau, Ariel Eliaz and many more. 

Bottle films like Shiva Baby are extremely interesting, as they tend to present themselves more in the spirit of a play than a proper film.  With that in mind, the performances are extremely bolstered, and due to the help of an intimate approach with the cinematography, we get to read every bit of thought and emotion that passes through a character’s mind via their ever-shifting and expressive faces.  Shiva Baby is the kind of film where you could easily understand the lines of tension even if the sound is off, which makes the snappy writing that much more effective, as these experiences parallel in harmony and pull viewers through the relatively short film like a social roller coaster ride.