Moeko Fujii , July 18, 2024

The Eyes of Lacy

In Janet Planet, a girl’s gaze grows up Still from Janet Planet| A24

Girls on screen, the story goes, are there to be looked at. In Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade(2018), for instance, girlhood figures as a time of relentless exposure and self-consciousness. Kayla vlogs about the importance of confidence and self-image but finds both in woefully short supply. At a pool party thrown by one of the popular girls, she has a panic attack in the bathroom; in the presence of boys, she shrinks and cringes, like plastic wrap exposed to a flame. Adults are well-meaning but utterly incompetent, capable only of mortifying their children. The saving grace is that girlhood is just a phase, an ungainly prelude to “real” life.

A director like Céline Sciamma, on the other hand, marks out girlhood as a distinct period—a smaller, separate kind of life nestled inside the humdrum rhythms of adults. Boys do not exist; adults do not mortify their children, but neither do they pay much attention to these figures, who seem to the viewer touched by magic. “It’s not that you don’t remember, it’s that you don’t listen,” a girl says to her father in Petite Maman(2021). When girls are placed at the center of the frame, in other words, they either burn with self-awareness or shake back their hair, unaware of their otherworldliness. 

But then there are films about girls who look. What these girls share is a bluntness, a self-serious gaze that comes from being consigned to the periphery of the main action, which is invariably the lives of others. In Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl(2001), the girl in question, twelve-year-old Anaïs, watches the sexual misadventures of her beautiful older sister with raging jealousy and sororal love; in Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun(2022), eleven-year-old Sophie trains her gaze on her divorced father during a trip to Turkey, trying to understand his melancholy.

It is in this tradition of curious witness that Annie Baker presents her debut film Janet Planet. Here, the bespectacled eleven-year-old Lacy watches her mother, Janet, and the three people who come in and out of her orbit during a summer in western Massachusetts in the 1990s. Unlike so many other coming-of-age tales, this one isn’t about sexual awakening. “I wanted to capture something else about a kind of intellectual, spiritual development happening for a little girl, that I’ve actually seen in a lot of movies about boys . . . Kiarostami movies or Pialat movies, just these amazing movies about where you kind of feel a child’s brain and way of seeing the world changing over the course of a movie,” Baker told an audience during the New York Film Festival.

The film scholar Mary Ann Doane points out that we are often uncomfortable with the idea of women who look. Women in glasses—the ultimate “lookers”—in classical Hollywood film, she argues, are either transformed into more tolerable objects by having their glasses taken away, made over into beauty queens, or killed off. But how do we feel about a girl who keeps the glasses on; what is it like to be looked at by a girl? Numerous reviews of Janet Planetdescribe Lacy as owlish—an “owlish misfit,” an “owlish presence,” possessed of an “owlish precociousness.” Owls, or at least owlish men, make us feel a specific kind of discomfort. Mary McCarthy described the communist men she argued with, or rather argued at, at parties as “dark, smooth-haired owls with large white lugubrious faces and glasses,” who “had the air, as they stood with folded arms, of listening not to a disagreement but to a confession.” Their aloof gaze made her feel “bitterly ashamed”: “They made me feel petty and shallow; they had, shall I say, a daily ugliness in their life that made my pretty life tawdry.”

Owlishness, then, is the opposite of pretty, petty, and shallow; it is a term we reserve for those who are more lens than body, who make us acutely, uncomfortably aware of our own moral and physical imperfections. They do not undergo transformation; they witness ours. “Sometimes I feel like she’s watching me,” Lacy’s mother, Janet, tells a new boyfriend. “When you’re not with her?” he asks. “Yeah.” Janet is the filter through which Lacy sees the world.

What else does Lacy see? When we think about a child’s point of view, we often fetishize its imputed innocence; their perspective is a vehicle for an adult’s pathetic idealization of how they appear to others. In Janet Planet, Baker reveals the range of people’s investments in Lacy’s gaze, how they feel they must account for themselves to her.

After Lacy returns home from summer camp early, we meet Janet’s boyfriend, Wayne, who feels judged by Lacy’s gaze, her presence an unyielding reminder that he is not a good father to his children from a prior marriage. Lacy’s look is a light he would like to turn off. In one scene, when she enters the living room where he’s outstretched with a migraine, she is told to get out: “I wasn’t saying anything,” she cries, “I wasn’t talking to you.” Covering his eyes, he shoves her out of the room and slams the door in her face. Yet for others, a young girl’s look may be something to covet. After Wayne leaves, Janet runs into her friend, Regina, who flees a commune (which Janet calls a cult) and a bad boyfriend (the cult leader) and comes to stay with Lacy and Janet. One day, Regina and Lacy talk in a car after Regina fails a job interview. Lacy looks at her steadily, then asks her if lots of people fall in love with her. “Why do you say that?” Regina asks, a little coyly; she could use the encouragement. “A lot of people fall in love with my mom,” Lacy says, flatly. Regina’s face falls a little, and she says: “Well your mom is wonderful. But she has terrible taste in men.”

On film, daughters often inherit ways of looking from their mothers and thus prepare themselves to be looked at. A classic scene is a daughter trying on lipstick at her mother’s vanity table mirror. But in Janet Planet, the question of orienting oneself around a partner, or around men, is not about surfaces. “I know I’m not that beautiful,” Janet tells Lacy one night as they lie awake. “But I’ve always had this knowledge that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried. And I think maybe it’s ruined my life.” “Can you stop?” Lacy asks, and clarifies: “Stop trying.” To stop trying would mean to exist in a world simply of Lacy and her mother, and while that is a full life for Lacy, it is not enough for Janet. The desires of mother and daughter diverge—a necessary asymmetry, difficult in any kind of love.

As Regina leaves, a new man enters the film—Avi, Regina’s ex and a potential love interest of Janet’s. He is immune to Lacy’s gaze; for Avi, Lacy is another body in an audience. With his folksy amiability, he captures Janet’s attention, to Lacy’s displeasure. In an interview with The New Yorker, Baker said, “The thing that actually made me think, I want to write this movie, was picturing evaporating your mother’s boyfriend with your brain.” And evaporate he does; in a sequence in which Janet goes on a picnic date with Avi, the film crosscuts between them and Lacy, who is alone in her dark room, praying in front of an altar of dolls, trolls, and tchotchkes. Avi reads Rilke to Janet on a blanket under a tree; we see her rapt in attention, then Lacy closes her eyes. We hear Avi’s voice stop reading, mid-sentence, and we see Janet sitting on the picnic blanket by herself. Avi has disappeared—did Lacy wish him away? Then, we return to the park, where Janet packs up her picnic blanket, walks back to her car, nibbles on a drumstick, and starts to drive back home.

Janet thus finds herself alone, again. A silence falls, in a film so full of sound—the crunch of feet on gravel, the buzz of cicadas and lawn mowers and mall music. Until that point, the diegetic sound points to a world beyond the frame, an ambient fullness that we cannot see, and yet whose presence we sense if we attend to it. Without Avi’s voice, Janet’s world comes to feel bare. The faint call of birds, the sound of her scraping her own plate, only seems to accent her loneliness. The realism of the film slips—where did Avi go?—and we sense a shift in what Lacy has come to understand: perhaps not that she can make her mother’s boyfriend disappear at will, like a fickle god that can erase parts of creation with a glance, but that for the first time, she is considering her mother’s independent existence, her need for more than just Lacy.

The final frame of the film is a close-up of Lacy’s face, as she watches her mother dance at a party in a barn. Her gaze is not too different than it was in the onset of the film; Lacy still prefers to sit on the sidelines and watch Janet. And yet something has irrevocably changed. If, throughout the film, Lacy’s gaze has been invested with a certain kind of power—to intrude, to flatter, to evaporate—here, the world flows uninterrupted before her. We cut between seeing what Lacy sees—shot after shot of her mother with one partner after another—and her at the sidelines, unnoticed.

A kind older woman sits beside Lacy, and asks her: “Do you want to dance?” The first time, Lacy says no. When she asks again—“Are you sure?”—she doesn’t answer. The camera closes in on her face. We see her look at Janet, then the backs of strangers—the rhythm of the town, swinging round and round. How does a girl’s gaze grow up? Janet Planetsuggests that this is an interior shift: by having her mother pass from being a part of herself to being a part of the world, Lacy comes to take in that world through a fuller, separate vision—alone, and unpredictable.

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