Review of Irina Bas’s film “Baby”

Irina Bas’s directorial debut “Baby” has been released, premiering at the “Koroche” festival in Kaliningrad in 2023. In the film, Maria Matzel and Victoria Isakova play out the drama of the complex relationship between mother and daughter. He regrets that good actresses capable of more were locked into the narrow confines of their roles, Julia Shagelman.

If a Russian director needs to portray a toxic mother in a film, then, as a rule, he takes Victoria Tolstoganova or Victoria Isakova for this role. If a rebellious young girl, then Maria Matzel. At least for the last couple of years, in every second project this role goes to her. Both actresses, as a rule, play their parts brilliantly, but such an obvious casting already serves as an indicator that from “Baby,” which initially bore the more memorable title “The Asphalt is Warm in Summer,” you shouldn’t expect a particularly unconventional look at the conflict between two generations of women in one family.

This family, however, is not entirely ordinary. Unlike the much more common situation both in life and in films, here it was the mother (Isakova) who left her daughter (Matzel) when she was very young. The girl Dasha was raised by a strict father (Alexey Faddeev). In the very first scenes, we learn that this is a man of rather conservative views: he is outraged by the revealing outfit in which his 17-year-old daughter performs at the graduation concert, and when he finds out that her friend would like to become an actress, he asks why not immediately a prostitute . Dasha herself is going to go to the Faculty of Regional Studies in Murmansk, chosen by her father, where she leaves her small town immediately after graduation.

In fact, she is going to St. Petersburg to enter the theater school (after all, being an actress is her dream, and not her friend’s), but the main thing is to find her mother and express to her everything that is boiling and painful. And before that, of course, as a sign of liberation and the transition to adulthood, cut your hair short and dye your hair red. Another such step should be parting with her virginity: Dasha, in whom a difficult childhood with a controlling father and an absent mother gave rise to a desire for self-destruction, decides to sell it by posting an ad on a special website. But this seemingly wild plot device is not at all original: it has already been used at least in the American series “Big Little Lies” (2017–2019) and the domestic “Alice Can’t Wait” (2022).

The filmmakers go through the usual plot and visual clichés from movies about teenagers: Dasha dances in clubs, illuminated by neon flashes, has passive-aggressive and simply aggressive dialogues with her mother, who is not at all ready for her appearance on her doorstep, and also runs away every now and then in disheveled feelings – from mom or from men, all like a selection of potential rapists. The most decent of them seems to be Fyodor (Stepan Belozerov), a young man of uncertain occupation from a wealthy family, with whom Dasha even almost begins a relationship, but before it even begins, it ends in another deliberately dramatic quarrel.

The girl’s mother, Lena, even though she is an adult, behaves in much the same way. In general, she and Dasha have a lot in common: both are impulsive, impetuous, do not tolerate control over themselves, but at the same time they do not quite understand what to do when they need to make decisions on their own and bear responsibility for them. Of course, this is why at first they are unable to find a common language, but gradually they nevertheless become closer and learn to support each other. True, it all looks as if the film was invented in reverse order. First, the ending appeared with a shock phrase, referring to the first title of the picture, and then the previous events were drawn to it, sometimes with great effort. Therefore, the whole structure turns out to be very shaky and threatens to collapse from the slightest breath of logic or common sense.