"I'm gonna enjoy becoming a part of a sky like this, Dad," Milla (Eliza Scanlen) tells her father (Ben Mendelsohn) as she holds up a camera, experimentally training its lens on the thick sheet of cloud overhead. A floppy felt hat protects the 15-year-old's head, shaven in deference to the chemo she's been undergoing for an unnamed form of cancer.
(Amongst the mostly punchy dialogue, there are a few such lines that perhaps would've rung truer on the stage, where Babyteeth began its life — Rita Kalnejais here adapting her play of the same name.)
The scene evokes a similarly bittersweet beach outing in the latest adaptation of Little Women, during which the sickly Beth March, also played by Scanlen, speaks calmly to her sister Jo of her own impending demise: "It's like the tide going out. It goes out slowly but it can't be stopped."
While she's confined to the narrative periphery of Greta Gerwig's film, Scanlen's probably terminal teen occupies centre stage in Babyteeth, wherein her coming of age — taking the form of an intoxicating first love — is paired with her cruelly premature physical decline.
This dangerously maudlin set-up is buoyed by a coolly eclectic soundtrack, which finds Vashti Bunyan mingling with Bach and tUnE-yArDs, and a set of vivid, lived-in performances from homegrown talent — Miss Fisher's Essie Davis and Acute Misfortune's Toby Wallace holding court alongside Mendelsohn and Scanlen.
I'd be remiss not to state that the young Sydney-born actress — a Home and Away alumnus who's been courting Hollywood with some success — has come under fire recently for the short film Mukbang, which she wrote and directed.
An outcry over the film's handling of cultural appropriation and race followed its being awarded a prize as part of this year's digital edition of the Sydney Film Festival.
This controversy ought not to cast too heavy a pall over the Australian release of Babyteeth, a beautifully observed little film flush with messy humanity.
As Milla, Scanlen readily swings between shy and reckless, vivacious and sullen — her temperament changing as often as her wigs: she opts for a long, sandy blonde number at school; a messy bleached bun for sneaking out of the house; a choppy turquoise bob at home.
Moses, the lanky, rough-hewn object of her budding affections, is played by Wallace, who took out the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, where Babyteeth premiered. (The prize also went to an Australian in 2018: Baykali Ganambarr, for his role in The Nightingale.)
Festooned with tattoos and a rats-tail that announce him as a miscreant (and maybe a Die Antwoord fan), Moses first stumbles into Milla's orbit while she's waiting for a train after school. "Your hair's like bangles or something," he proffers, head cocked in drug-addled contemplation of her long auburn tresses, yet to be shorn. Though lacking in eloquence, he exudes a certain raw geniality.
When he proceeds to ask her for money, she promises $50 if he'll agree to take clippers to her head, and then accompany her home to dinner — where his roguish demeanour, and her freshly botched 'do, cause the deep furrowing of parental brows.
The revelation that he's 23, Milla's senior by an unsuitably large margin, doesn't help matters: "I'm a bit freaked out by that," mother Anna confesses, half laughing — extra candid thanks to the benzos in her system, as prescribed by her psychiatrist husband.
And on some level, that would seem to be the point: Moses is precisely not the kind of guy you bring back to your tastefully furnished, open plan suburban Sydney home to meet your folks, however loving and liberal-minded they may be. Milla's doing so suggests a teenage rebellious streak, a longing for excitement, undoubtedly intensified by the logic of that Tim McGraw song. (Don't worry, it's not on the soundtrack.)
Equally, Moses wants his 50 bucks, and to maybe swipe some of those prescription pills while no one's looking.
Kalnejais is smart to retain this ambiguity even as the chemistry fitfully blossoms between the two of them, leaving open the possibility that intentions on both sides are not entirely pure.
Nor does she feel duty-bound to visit judgement upon Milla's parents, who bristle at Moses's drug habit and yet, when it comes to the matter of their own neuroses, are quick to reach for the prescription pad. Such bourgeois hypocrisy becomes a complicating factor within the narrative, without in any way becoming the point.
(Although, a fleeting scene of Anna woozily fishing leaves out of the pool to the strains of Mozart's Symphony No. 25 does read like a modern and pointedly upper-middle-class take on the sped-up montage of Ellen Burstyn cleaning her apartment, hopped up on diet pills, in Requiem for a Dream.)
Only in the final act of Babyteeth do Kalnejais and Murphy give way to impulses that are a little too cutesy, too neat, for the richly difficult, skilfully told story preceding it.
Babyteeth is in cinemas from July 23.
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2020-07-21 14:56:00Z
CAIiEO8otZmge4cgiQqRgiBZqGAqFggEKg4IACoGCAow3vI9MPeaCDDciw4
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