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Shiva Baby Takes on Social, Religious, Sexual Anxiety with a Funny-Scary Gravity

    

    Shiva Baby is about an aimless young bisexual Jewish woman attending a shiva with her parents where she happens to run into both her ex-girlfriend and the wife of the man she’s currently sleeping with. And it is the most discomforting movie I’ve seen since maybe Uncut Gems. The film is the debut of Emma Seligman, adapted from her own student short, and she rather cleverly messes around with the inherently comic connotations of her premise. While on paper it reads like a recipe for hijinks, a romantic-comedy farce even, Seligman follows her narrative into logical corners, lingers on the awkward situations and confrontations, builds tension in her smattering of storied relationships, and more often than not actually skews horror in tone. Which makes sense, as that’s exactly how Danielle (Rachel Sennott) is experiencing the proceedings.
    This film is artfully structured and gets a lot out of what is clearly a limited budget. With the exception of a brief scene in Danielle’s apartment before the shiva, it plays out almost in real time and in one location (an aunts’ house in a suburb of Brooklyn). It’s a crowded environment that Seligman shoots with increasing claustrophobia as the situation becomes more and more uncomfortable for Danielle, asked by numerous relatives and neighbours questions about her relationship status and her studies, while being occasionally insulted or embarrassed by her parents (Polly Draper and Fred Melamed). These begin rather innocuously, but take on a greater invasive context the more we’re put into her psyche and these rather small stakes build up. And much of the humour that there is in this -a very relatable kind even to gentiles who’ve had to endure religious community events, as I can personally attest to- is drowned out by a sharp and terrifying score by Ariel Marx, heavy on the kind of string motifs you hear regularly in slasher movies. This doesn’t represent an incompatible meshing of tones though, as Seligman understands the muted humour that underlines certain intense social situations, and how that itself can contribute to ones’ anxiety. And there is something perversely funny to such elaborately foreboding music being used to illustrate a development that would be a punchline in any ordinary comedy.
    This is not an ordinary comedy, and Danielle is not an ordinary character. Sennott is superb in conveying an authentic early-20s malaise and confusion, necessarily masked (but not terribly well) in the obligatory social circumstance she finds herself in. They are protective layers, she comes to the shiva with a lot of baggage she’d rather not have to explain. We see how uncomfortable she is having to clarify her degree in gender studies to these dispassionate and disappointed conservative elders, imagine if they knew she had a sugar daddy and was in fact not heterosexual. In Sennotts’ nuanced performance, which reminds me sometimes of Greta Gerwig, I see the shades of a lot of friends either in the LGBTQ community or engaged in a traditionally unconventional mode of work or study who have to suppress a part of themselves in certain company.
    Of course this doesn’t stop Maya (Molly Gordon), the ex who Danielle is frequently contrasted against, from teasing her every chance she gets. Their scenes of sexual tension together within the religious constraints of their context are reminiscent of those in Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience, albeit with less subdued longing and more playful passive aggression. It’s a different dynamic though to a same-sex coupling and is the one area where a lightness successfully penetrates the movies’ intense veneer. The success of the movies’ representation should also be applauded. Bi erasure is a real thing, and Shiva Baby in portraying bisexuality avoids all the conventional stereotypes for an honest depiction. Danielle is very attracted to Max (Danny Deferrari), yet what she had with Maya was clearly genuine too. She’s not the frivolous libertine pop culture often equates with bisexuality, she just happens to have had meaningful sexual relationships with both women and men.
    Sex is a running theme of the film, and perhaps the greatest source of Danielle’s overwhelming anxiety. Upon learning Max has a wife Kim (Dianna Agron) she sets about comparing herself to her: an attractive, blonde, non-Jewish businesswoman. She sends Max a sext as a result of this feeling of inadequacy, which of course spirals into another geyser of personal stress. Perceiving the events of the movie through the prism of Danielle, everything does in some way come around to sex -even Max and Kims’ baby, always whining, seems to be an avatar of reproduction and yet another symbol of the orthodox sexual expectation Danielle feels pressured by. That crossroads of sexual agency and self worth for young women is very compelling to Seligman, and she certainly illustrates it in an exceptionally vivid way that gets across how it can feel like the world is closing in on you. The movie literally expresses this in a sequence highly evocative of Rosemary’s Baby that toes the line of reality and imagination for Danielle as she is forcibly infantilized by Kim and the other guests. And the films’ climax between Danielle and Kim really solidifies the baby as the aforementioned metaphor.
    There’s a lot of fascinating stuff there, a lot of curious choices, and it’s very impressive for a film that is its’ directors’ debut feature. I remember when Shiva Baby premiered at TIFF, I elected not to see it because I couldn’t really get a handle on what it was and preferred to spend my money on the films I was more immediately interested in. Perhaps I should have taken the chance though, this is one of the more unique indie movies to come out of that festival’s crop. Emma Seligman found a way to do so much with so little, and in addition to being an entertaining, surprisingly distressing movie, Shiva Baby is a weirdly rewarding one too. As emerging artists go, both Seligman and Sennott are worth keeping an eye on.

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