Playwright turned filmmaker Annie Baker’s “Janet Planet” plays out like a wistful summer daze. The trickles of thought that seem to appear and disappear voice the secret magical world of a child where reality is eschewed for imagination. 11-year-old loner Lacy lives with her acupuncturist mother in a wooden cabin tucked in the wilderness of Massachusetts. Over the course of the summer, people come and go from their lives as she tries to make sense of the world around her.
“The thing that actually made me think, I want to write this movie, was picturing evaporating your mother’s boyfriend with your brain. I remember feeling that way at eleven, as though I had a little wizard brain. And I have met a lot of eleven-year-olds now, from my auditioning process, and they all have wizard brains. I really feel like they’re all wizards. So, what if spiritual longing and destructive desire and love for one’s mother and the power of inanimate objects could all be harnessed to evaporate a mother’s potentially nefarious new boyfriend? That was what the movie was about for me.”
– Annie Baker
Janet Planet (2023) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
It is the summer of 1991. Eleven-year-old Lacy slips away from her summer camp cabin and sprints downhill in the dark toward a dimly lit wooden telephone booth. Lacy picks up the phone and makes a call. The call is short but threatening. She dramatically demands to be picked up from the summer camp. If her demand is not met, she threatens to bring her uneventful and friendless life to an end.
However, the next morning, when her mother, Janet, comes to get her and the girls at the camp sweetly bid her adieu, Lacy realizes she could have done away with the drama. Lacy notices her mother’s boyfriend, Wayne, has driven Janet to the camp. Realizing that Wayne will be around indefinitely, Lacy is not too happy to go back to her home and urges Janet to let her return to the camp. But it is too late.
Back home, Lacy tries to strike up conversations with Wayne, but the latter, in essence crotchety, keeps it curt. Wayne is not too fond of Lacy and is already seen directing the course of the mother-daughter relationship. That night, Janet tells Lacy that Wayne finds it weird that Lacy still needs Janet to sleep with her. Before Janet leaves, she gives Lacy a strand of her hair—a piece of her mother that would help her fall asleep.
Devoid of the remotest sign of chemistry, Wayne and Janet’s relationship seems codependent. Wayne, chronically agonized by migraines, has to rely on Janet, a licensed acupuncturist. However, that quid pro quo in no way translates to an exchange of basic necessities in sustaining a loving relationship, as Wayne does not think twice before blaming Janet for passing over her migraine to him.
Once Lacy meets Wayne’s daughter, Sequoia and the children develop an easy rapport over the course of a day. However, Lacy does not have a chance to meet her ever again as Janet breaks up with Wayne on Lacy’s advice. Following Wayne’s departure, someone else gravitates towards Janet– it is Janet’s childhood friend, Regina. She leaves her hippie commune, which she insists is not a cult, and moves in with Janet and her daughter as a house guest. Regina was in a relationship with the commune leader, Avi, but she ended things after he started sleeping with other women.
Regina strikes a chord with Lacy. They both seem to be on nodding terms over Janet’s poor choice of romantic interests. One night, Janet and Regina spend idly recounting the days of their youth, but the conversation ends in tension. Regina, too, leaves soon after. Avi’s entry into Janet’s life is perhaps the most short-lived. Avi, a new-age mystic, arrives and enthralls both Janet and Lacy. However, he goes away, or rather, evaporates out of Janet’s life. Lacy begins her sixth standard classes after recuperating from her sickness after returning from her summer slumber.
Janet Planet (2023) Movie Ending Explained:
How does the summer shape the relationship between Janet and Lacy?
The film identifies Lacy’s codependency on her mother. She is too keen on partaking in adult affairs, and Janet, too, is typified by her freewheeling nature as a parent. This secures the deal for Lacy as it builds a false assurance in the young mind of her mother’s devotion to her. However, as the summer proceeds to the fall, Lacy notices her mother’s suffusive nature– her ability to scatter her being amongst everyone who is given access to her life.
In the final moments of the film, as the camera dwells on Lacy’s ambiguous countenance that quickly escalates to a worrisome reaction, it perhaps hits Lacy that Janet does not belong to Lacy– she has a piece of her mother like everyone else. At that moment, during that contra dance, the fear of the growing distance between her mother and her washes over her. The shot-counter shot editing reveals that Lacy is watching over her mother, but Janet is hidden by the dancing bodies. Lacy is perturbed by this sudden realization but gradually comes to accept the unexpected.
Janet Planet (2023) Movie Themes Analysed:
“Can I have a piece of you?”
Lacy requests her mother as Janet firmly tells her of her boyfriend’s objection surrounding Lacy and Janet sleeping together. As Lacy lies in her bed, gazing into the bottomless darkness, a sliver of light contours her mother’s strand of her, a piece of her. For even a child-like Lacy who is allowed free-flowing entry into the most mature and adult-centric conversations, the world gains a fresh significance when it is unpacked in pieces.
In “Janet Planet,” the form, the lyricism, and the relative intimacy between the characters are bearings of a child’s perception. It is Lacy’s perception that defines the structure. There is no major drama in “Janet Planet.” The people who move in and out of Janet’s orbit seem to just fizzle out as Lacy’s experience is being quantified. Therefore, Lacy watches Regina leave, but the ‘why’ does not reach her, and since it does not reach Lacy, we are not privy to it either.
However, what matters is how Lacy tries to reach out to the piece of The New Yorker magazine poster that gets left behind– cellotaped on the wall– after Regina’s friend comes to get all of her belongings. For even a precocious child like Lacy, devoid of any baby talk, these acts deftly suggest how a child’s experience is shaped by sensual stimuli. These trickles of sensual stimuli allow the child to savor pieces of the world that await exposure rather than sending the child to a profundity overdrive by bombarding her with ripe philosophical questions.
The fragmentary perceptions that Lacy gathers over the summer are spliced in her understanding of the world. As years rolled by, she would not remember what relationship Regina shared with Avi or perhaps that heated conversation Regina had with Janet. The memory of Regina’s brief presence in their lives would be evoked by the sensory memory of Regina’s St. Ives Henna Shampoo, the spools of hair on the shower wall, and the piece of the poster that gets left behind. Similarly, Janet’s strand of hair and her dangly earrings would evoke memories of this summer.
