Nasty Baby

Films are like visiting a city. Mainstream movies cover the big attraction: Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame Cathedra, and Musée du Louvre. Indie films take you through the back streets and occasionally you get a tour of the underbelly of a city. "Nasty Baby" by filmmaker Sebastián Silva takes you on a back ally tour of the character of ordinary people. We all like to think we know what we will do in hypothetical situations. The truth is often we don't. This movie starts off pleasant enough with likable, real character; but from the start there is a slow burn that is building towards some unwanted destination. This movie takes you around the big attractions of a city and delivers you via the characters in places you would never expect to visit or would want to go. Check out "Nasty Baby" if you get a chance.

Wow. Just... wow. I don't think I've seen more than five films in my life that take such an unpredictable, wild turn and tonal shift like this did. I had no idea what it was about, and the first hour or so was great on itself. Engaging characters, well-acted, very humane in its storytelling. What prompted the filmmakers to do what they did? Well, it helps to bring up questions of what the "everyday" person would do in that scenario. Do I buy it? Well, I don't "not buy it". I can definitely say that I didn't dislike its execution. One doesn't really know what they would do in such a scenario. Of course, everyone would like to say "I would have done the right thing!", but we just don't know. This is the troubling question that this film wants us to answer, and honestly, I think it did an amazing job of it. In real life, everything is normal, everyone can be normal... until it's not. What DOES happen when the "stuff hits the fan"? What WOULD we do? There are many different ways that the film could've posed these questions, and sure enough many other films that I've seen have posed them in different ways, but I think the unorthodox unpredictability of this really hits those points home. I think that first normal hour is needed for this reason, and why no one should read anything about this film going into it. I can totally see why it may not have worked for so many people, but I think the execution was on point. For better or worse, the filmmakers took a huge, giant risk here (like, I cannot stress enough how HUGE that risk was), and they didn't want this film to be forgotten lightly. For my money, I left it feeling like it had made me think about a lot of different things, along with being a highly intriguing, engaging film.

Chilean director Sebastián Silva's Sundance premiered sixth feature NASTY BABY is an oddity in queer cinema, it ostensibly starts to tackle with a topical issue of gay couples, after homosexuality has been reckoned more or less as a normalcy in America, - parenthood, but rounds off with a shark-jumping bang. Freddy (director Silva himself) is an European immigrant, from Spain, one divines, he is a performance artist lives in New York with his black boyfriend Mo (Adebimpe, leading singer from TV on the Radio). Freddy and his bestie Polly (Wiig) are both broody: Freddy is caught up in his new project named "Nasty Baby" which involves adults imitating baby behaviours, it is absolutely nonsensical both on paper and in its eventual form, while Polly, at one point is joked by Freddy as a"semen vampire", she is not young anymore, so timing is also crucial for her whether she could ever become a mother. Naturally, they decide to having a baby together, only to their dismay that Freddy's sperm count is too low. So Freddy is egged to persuade Mo as the sperm donor, and the latter eventually caves in.

Meanwhile, a mentally impaired vagrant Bishop (Cathey) lives nearby begins to wrack the trio firstly by leaf-blowing in every early morning across the street of Freddy and Mo's apartment, then physically pestering Polly several times and constantly hurling homophobic abuse at them, anyway he is cuckoo, and Silva ascertains that the aversion to Bishop is plain vicarious.

Time goes by until a mood-shifting third act happens on the day when Polly phones Freddy that she is not pregnant with Mo's semen whereas the truth is otherwise, she only wants to give him a surprise later to cheer him up after knowing Freddy's Nasty Baby is cold-shouldered by the gallery owner initially shows interest but backtracks. On his way to his apartment, a tetchy and smouldering Freddy encounters Bishop again, and this time, there will be blood! The film changes its gear bluntly from a blanched mumblecore to a noirish thriller saturated with consternation and fumbles (a hallmark deer-in-the-headlight will arrive later as an over-obvious metaphor). It is a wayward move notwithstanding, but what Silva brings home to audience is the elemental homicidal urge resides in those carefree hipsters, whom we are half-heartedly rooting for until that crunch. The trio is going to become parents of a mixed race baby, but a callous truth is that not only they have no instinct to save one when they can, they also unanimously chooses the other way around, on a deceitful ground that man is a scourge, despicable and expendable, yet, he is still an egalitarian human being, when bringing a new life into this world and extinguishing an old one (assumably with the same skin color) has been juxtaposed in that fashion, it electrifies viewers to jump on that cynical old question: how can we keep our inner demon at bay and raise a child free of such contamination? That's my takeaway of this unorthodox indie fare when being steeped in the catchy closing-credits anthem: Ida Corr and Fedde Le Grand's LET ME THINK ABOUT IT. There is some food for thought left, but also one cannot help feeling being short-changed.

Grotesque (Noun) - A distortion of reality, often comic or satiric in nature.

Sebastian Silva has a knack for making films that mask simmering malice, danger, and outright evil in a playfully subversive manner. "The Maid" featured a long-time servant out to make mischief for her callous employers. "Magic Magic" detailed the slow crack-up of an innocent and naive California blonde as she's dragged deep into the bowels of South American ethnicity (read: Reality).

Silva himself stars in this latest excursion into unwanted reality, one his character, Freddy, seems just as terrified to face: that of fatherhood. Freddy lives in an airy Brooklyn apartment with his partner Mo (Tunde Adebimpe). He's a visual and performance artist who's got a child's attention span (and general life attitude): flighty, not overtly responsible or aware of other's feelings, and prone to fits of rage that mask an underlying self-hatred and nonacceptance. Throw into this emotionally thick stew Freddy's fixation on getting his best friend Polly (Kristin Wiig) pregnant with Mo's sperm (as Freddy's isn't up to the task - ouch), an obsession with an oddly self-conscious performance art piece that articulates his own fear and loathing, and a crazy neighbor who's becoming more and more aggressive in his assaults. There's enough TNT here to detonate the most stalwart brownstone.

Most of Freddy's fears and neuroses are down-played in Nasty Baby, just as Juno Temple's were in "Magic Magic" and Silva is good at this. Mo, Polly, and even Wendy, Freddy's assistant (the sparkly Alia Shawkat, who also produces here) can see the cracks and the film does a good job at slowly turning up the seismic rumble under the surface.

Reg E. Cathy (miles away from his displaced Barbecue chef on House of Cards) is an effectively unstable menace who constantly pushes Freddy's self-hatred buttons with homophobic slurs and taunts. Does Freddy really want a child? Or is it something he feels he must do to complete some kind of bohemian ideal or even his latest performance piece? Nobody around him seems sure, even his elderly gay neighbor (the superb Mark Margolis) who's seen his share of battle wounds from just being himself.

Nasty Baby eventually erupts in an unexpected and nasty way that I won't spoil. It's satisfying though not in a real audience-pleasing manner, but you can see the terror and dread in Silva's face up until the end. It's anything but light entertainment, but like all of Silva's films it will make you think and will hold up over repeat viewings. The iTunes commentary, with Silva, Adebimpe, and Wiig is a hoot, by the way.

Personally I'm at a loss for words to write about this movie. I love Sebastián Silva film's but this one left me a bit empty and confused. I have no doubt there is a serious message flowing throughout this story but this time it went right over my head.

The central character is Freddy. He's an artist and this story is about him preparing to film or rather video his entry to an art exhibition. His art project is to record himself dressed and acting like an infant, a baby in diapers! Throughout this story there is an elderly man who taunts, harasses, and belittles Freddy because Freddy is gay. Freddy and boyfriend Mo ignore this hatred coming from this man. Freddy and Mo get on with their lives. Then one evening the hate filled neighbor follows Freddy while walking home. The hate filled man continues his harassment of Freddy and Freddy has had his fill of this grotesque man and strikes back.

At this point the story suddenly changes. It becomes dark and fearful and almost neutralizes the previous hour or so of story. I wondered what is Sebastián Silva doing to this mostly benign story. I will not describe what happens because the viewer must determine what the statement is for themselves. For me this movie is about innocents. Freddy as an artist is innocent in his creative quest, the baby is innocents. Freddy & Mo just want to live their lives and not cross the paths of others. The elderly hate filled man is the world once innocents is abandoned. Freddy is forced to abandon his innocents by the hate filled man who represents society in which innocents tries to survive.

At movies end we see Freddy and friends are admiring an infant in a stroller. Here we see the same movements and sounds that Freddy created for his art project as a baby in diapers. We are left wondering what is the future for this real little infant. At what points will it's innocents be forced out of him as it was forced out of Freddy.