Review of the film “Come to Me, Baby” by Rebecca Miller

Rebecca Miller’s comedy melodrama She Came to Me, which opened this year’s Berlin Film Festival, was released. The story about the unexpected forms that love (for music, a woman or God) takes on in a modern metropolis turned out to be not at all as charming as its author seems to think Julia Shagelman.

When “Come to Me, Baby” premiered in Berlin in February of this year, many were surprised by the choice to not only include a frivolous film about the strangeness of love in the program of a festival famous for its politicization, but also to make it the opening film. Perhaps the Berlinale organizers just wanted a little romance before diving into their usual socially significant content. Of course, Rebecca Miller’s film cannot do without questions of the current “agenda”: ​​it touches on the topics of social inequality, the boundaries of consent in intergender relationships, and mental health, but the director (who is also the author of the script) touches on all this very superficially. But the love affairs of Miller’s heroes are not so much inspiring as they are perplexing.

The film is about the intersection of two unequally respected families, which happened when their children fell in love with each other. The members of one of them, wealthy New Yorkers of intellectual professions, burdened with a collection of neuroses, seemed to have wandered into Miller from a Woody Allen film, losing their sense of humor along the way. Stephen Louddem (Peter Dinklage), a composer in a prolonged creative crisis, is married to Patricia (Anne Hathaway), an obsessive obsessive about cleanliness and order. They met when Stephen fell into a deep depression after the failure of his last opera – Patricia was his psychotherapist. How she managed to retain her license after such a turn is not explained in the film, but she continues to practice, longingly listening to erotic fantasies about herself from new patients.

Patricia also has an 18-year-old son from her first marriage, Julian (Evan Ellison), who is in love with 16-year-old Teresa (Harlow Jane) – together they experience the joys of first sex and dream of saving the world from the global climate crisis. The girl’s family is no match for the Louddems: her mother, an illegal immigrant from Poland Magdalena (Joanna Kulig), cleans other people’s houses, her stepfather Trey (Brian D’Arcy James) works in court as a stenographer, and in his spare time, along with other reenactors, he reenacts Civil War battles. And although he does not always wear a Confederate uniform, more often speaking on the side of the “northerners,” Miller makes it clear almost from the very beginning that we are dealing with a racist and sexist with the habits of a domestic tyrant.

The young lovers seem to be the emotional center of the film, but, frankly speaking, there is nothing particularly interesting about them – including for the director, who is distracted for a long time from their bright feelings by the chaotic mental tossing of the older generation. Stephen, whom his wife sends to get some fresh air and look on the streets for inspiration for a new opera, surprisingly, actually finds it. He meets Katrina (Marisa Tomei), a cargo tug captain who suffers from a “romantic addiction,” at a bar. Despite the admission that she even went to rehab after being arrested for stalking, he immediately goes to bed with her, but then runs away as soon as she hints at continuing the relationship. The result of this adventure is an opera called, like the original film, She Came to Me, and tells the story of a tugboat captain who lures men onto her ship to kill and eat.

Patricia, meanwhile, suddenly remembers her Catholic upbringing and begins to disappear all day long in a convent, to which she donates her fashionable outfits and helps in charity events. She also hires Magdalena as a housekeeper – and this is how both families finally learn about Julian and Teresa’s relationship. Trey is filled with his father’s anger, further fueled by the fact that Julian is of mixed race, and decides to sue him (despite the fact that everything happened out of love and consent for the young couple, sex with a minor is still illegal). The boy needs to be saved, but in the midst of this chaos, Katrina returns, who not only has not forgotten Stephen, but is now also convinced that he is also in love with her, since he made her his muse.

All this, in theory, should be fun, easy and ironic, but the picture suffers from sudden changes in intonation: the line of the eco-friendly Romeo and Juliet is too formulaic and saccharine, the story of Stephen and Katrina somehow blithely tramples even hints of common sense, and the side The plot with Patricia’s nervous breakdown and her subsequent departure to the monastery cannot be pulled out even by the acting work of Anne Hathaway, who bravely fights with an inconsistent script. Prefacing the film with a musical epigraph in the form of “Habanera” from Bizet’s opera, Miller develops the idea that love drives people crazy in the most literal way – and the kind of love shown in her film is one you really want to take care of.