BY EDWIN JAHIEL
BABY, IT'S YOU, the story of an inter-faith romance, was the title of the second movie written as well as directed (1983) by John Sayles, that superb independent film-maker. It is also the title of the film that opens in June 1998 the 11th season of the excellent P.O.V. documentary series airing on PBS. By another coincidence, Sayles's fictional works as well as the P.O.V. offerings are both concerned with people and the human condition.
The current BABY is by prize-winning film-maker Anne Makepeace. It is an autobiographical slice of life and time, about Ms.Makepeace and her Canadian-born husband, writer Peter Behrens, with a "supporting cast" of their non-mainstream (when not downright weird by conventional standards) baby-boomer siblings.
Having reached their late forties the childless couple decide to have a baby. At Anne's age "it's really hard to get pregnant the fun way," says Anne, so the two decide to undergo modern fertility procedures. These become a mini-medical Odyssey that involves body, mind and feelings I will not reveal what actually happens (or does not ) since the film is, in its way, a real-life suspense story, with revelations and with branching out into the principals' families. To various degrees, the latter involve Anne's brother Douglas who, in Utah, is planning to embark on polygamy and have twenty kids; Doug's patriarchically bearded neighbor who has seven wives; Anne's hippie-ishly bearded other brother Roger, a semi-recluse in Appalachian mountains with his company of goats; uncles and aunts from New England; Peter's artist sister Mary whose quandary parallels that of Anne in her first days in college; Peter's sister Anne in Canada, who, with her lover Tanya, adopts a baby; some other characters.
Very well shot by Uta Briesewicz, the film is a small tour-de-force in the way it follows chronologically and step-by-step the efforts, dashed hopes and new hopes of the parents-to-be (perhaps), their solid marriage, and Anna's reflections on her past. In a sense, she, as the documentary's prime maker, is stalking her own self, but with naturalness and no trace of play-acting, setting up situations or staging anything.
Andy Warhol's dictum that sooner or later everyone will have a few minutes of fame is debatable. What is unarguable however, is that, as BABY shows, all the lives of all human beings contain at least one movie subject, and probably many more as this documentary does.
It touches on family relationships, marriage, abortion, unexpected drama, changing or new standards and mores. "To breed or not to breed? That is the question " plus the belated decision to have a child in mid-life, while not elaborated upon, still speaks loudly of the rat-race for success and financial security, of the siren-song of professionalism, the business and busy-ness of this waning century. Other problems of Anne and her brethren can be laid on the doorstep of their Yankee parents whose relations with their children were, we suspect, hardly confidential, and for whom any mention of sex was inconceivable.
It's all there, both in text and sub-text, both in the banality of life and its unconventionalities. To what extent viewers will be touched or enlightened is an open question. But they will surely be interested and intrigued.
" Le mauvais gout mene au crime" (Stendhal)
Edwin Jahiel's movie reviews are at http://www.prairienet.org/ejahiel
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