Golden brown, a terminal temptress, wearing wigs of various tress, parents start to stress, at suitor’s state of dress, succumb to duress, forced to confess, all in a film of brilliant finesse.
With the strains of Zephyr Quartet’s gorgeous rendition of The Strangler’s hit, Golden Brown, BABYTEETH, has private school girl, Milla, standing on a platform waiting for a train. Suddenly, her internal reverie is shattered by an uncouth youth charging for a soon departing train. They are chalk and cheese, Milla, well groomed, educated, Moses, unkempt, a drop-out junkie, but could it be love at first shove?
BABYTEETH is a gloriously surprising film on every level at every turn, a whip smart script by Rita Kalnejais, based on her original play, brilliantly played by a core cast of four.
Eliza Scanlen plays Milla, a fifteen year old living with a potentially terminal disease. She’s the only child of psychiatrist, Harry, portrayed by Ben Mendelsohn and Anna, former classical pianist, played by Essie Davis. On the face of it, the family follows a so called normal structure in their green and leafy suburban street, each of them coping with the shadow of death that they try to relegate to the space where the elephant lives in the room.
Mendelsohn and Davis are at the peak of their performance powers as this married couple balancing tensions within their relationship with nuanced vigour and verisimilitude.
Enter Moses, in an explosive, unfiltered performance by Toby Wallace. He may be an opportunist junkie, but he becomes Milla’s addiction. Potentially as destructive as the disease riddling her body, Moses is a lot more fun, an iconoclastic life force injecting Milla with a lust for life that spits in the face of the Grim Reaper, releasing a devil may care awakening.
BABYTEETH is about coping with the chaos of life, the curve balls and kicks out of bounds, those outrageous slings and arrows cast in our direction and how dealing with them not always goes as planned, that no one strategy is necessarily the solution.
Director Shannon Murphy delivers a film that is wildly funny, full of unexpected grace notes that smash predictability, harnessing humour and humanity to the precipice of pain, then bungee jumping into a thrilling life enhancing plunge.
In this age of COVID-19 there is constant chatter of the new normal. BABYTEETH shows unequivocally, normal is a construct ripe for deconstructing, especially when done with such aplomb, panache and passion.
