scumbelievable
patreon
In the Flesh: Shiva Baby
🕑 Added 2021-04-13 22:32:55 +0000 UTCYou will never in your life want to get out of a structure as much as you’ll want to get out of put-upon college senior-cum-sugar baby Danielle’s (Rachel Sennott) aunt Sheila’s house in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Using anamorphic lenses, Director Emma Seligman and cinematographer Maria Rusche are able to capture broad, deep shots so packed full of bodies, bric-a-brac, and motion that the entire residence feels perpetually seconds away from collapsing and burying the extended Jewish community gathered within it for a shiva. Other reviewers have remarked at length on the sense of claustrophobia this choice creates, a pressure as intrusive and cloying as Danielle’s mother Debbie (Polly Draper) and father Joel (the unbeatable Fred Melamed), who along with the community’s other elders alternate between discussing her as though she isn’t present and commenting with hilarious frankness on her weight, career, personality, and prospects in life. This is a community in the truest sense, not some idyllic extended family but a group bound together by countless overlapping threads of connection and compulsory intimacy, carrying its history on its collective back.
Every character in Shiva Baby is a gorgeously sketched disaster, a wholly unique and yet culturally specific human conjured into reality at breakneck speed as the camera wriggles its way through the house’s packed interior. The machine-gun nitpicking between Danielle’s parents, her aunt Sheila’s clearly disordered obsession with weight (she half-jokingly threatens to get out a scale to see what Danielle, who’s recently lost weight, weighs), Maya’s deadpan raunchiness and childish jealousy — Seligman’s script is full to bursting but without a single inch of waste or redundancy. The movie’s 78 minutes feels, in the best way, closer to two and a half hours as it bombards us with social humiliation, farce, sight gags, and moments of aching warmth and tenderness. In one scene Danielle and Maya rekindle their damaged relationship beside the house while in the window above them an elderly woman goes about her business, a tableaux at once inherently funny and painfully accurate to the experience of queer love in insular communities.
The chemistry between Danielle and Maya is electric, young and dumb and charmingly dysfunctional. That earnestness plays well with the more posed and avoidant dynamic between Danielle and her unexpectedly married sugar daddy, Max (Danny Deferrari). Seligman’s debut feature is a sustained and muffled scream of frustrated exhaustion, a dramedy shot and scored like a horror movie — composer Ariel Marx makes heavy use of “scare chords” — and sustained by marvelously subtle facial and body work by Sennott, Melamed, and the entire ensemble. Its concluding sequence in which Joel insists on packing too many people into his already overcrowded van creates a screamingly funny rolling metaphor for the ways in which existing in community means both joy and sorrow are never far away, carried with us everywhere we go.
Comments
Matthew Perpetua
I was actually wondering what you specifically would make of this film!
