Shiva Baby is post-grad anxiety cinema for BA holders and it gave me a panic attack. Despite that, I still liked it, so it must be pretty great.
Shiva Baby is the feature debut of director Emma Seligman. It revolves around main character Danielle (Rachel Sennot) navigating a Jewish Shiva ceremony with her family’s religious community, her ex-girlfriend (Molly Gordon) and sugar daddy (Danny Defferari) also in attendance.
The film is sickeningly crafted to make everything as tense as possible. The filmmaking devices really highlight the fragility of Danielle’s attempts to keep her lies intact. She needs her parents (Fred Melamed and Polly Draper) to think her income is from babysitting and she needs her sugar daddy to believe she is a female entrepreneur going to law school. All parties edge around uncovering the things Danielle is attempting to mask at all times.
The string-heavy score does a wonderful job of being insufferably nauseating, literally just thinking about it makes my heart rate rise. The pacing is also very artful. It masters the use of constant interruptions from other funeral guests. The film also makes good use of transitions between different rooms of the house—which is the setting of 95% of the film.
Claustrophobic cinematography in such a tight circadian narrative is also super welcome. Really glad I didn’t know the synopsis of this film. As I was watching I somehow didn’t register 62 minutes had passed and that the entire film would in fact be the Shiva itself. Pretty neat.
As for the premise and the themes, I think this one spoke to such a niche but awful point in several graduate’s lives. I felt it was so ingenious yet so pretentious. Watching Danielle navigating what she is supposed to do between her success at Columbia and the rest of her life. Constantly feeling the need to keep up the facade of immediate success to the people in the Shiva.
Her fake-future-plans run through every panic-decision someone with a desire to go into the arts scrambles for post-grad. She tells them she is going into Law School, Marketing, Publishing, Grad School (masters right? That’s a masters) and ‘something in media like something media related’. And she must do this dance several times over to impress her ex-girlfriend, the older-man she’s being paid by, her parents, her relatives, her ex-girlfriend’s parents and so on. It turns the Shiva into a networking event of sorts despite the fact that it’s a funeral.
I also couldn’t help but relate the film’s writing to Lena Dunham’s writing in Girls. Not sure if this is due to a cultural resurgence or if it’s entirely my own algorithm repopularising the show. This comparison came from the similarity of a young post-grad artist living in the city with her parents paying her rent and bills. There was also a parallel to the satirical deadpan humour. The ‘Yeah well it pays the bills,’ and the ‘You’ve never paid a bill in your life’ of it. It’s the same intriguingly narrow cohort being satirised in both works—which actually makes for comedic brilliance.
As the first feature I watched for the 11th Femme Filmmakers Festival, Shiva Baby has so much to say on the constraints of making a name for yourself within a traditional structure. It touches on the constraints of Danielle’s gender through constant comments on her body, her profession, her sexuality, her religion as well as the burden of her youth. Sugaring was such a brilliant concept for exploring those themes. But its the comedy that provides both a palatability and a sharpening quality that assures the commentary slices through the narrative cleanly. And balancing this comedy with the general horror of…well all of it?
So did I like it? Yeah it’s like an old friend to me. I know her so well. Brilliant film overall, not one I’d watch again without a propranolol on hand though.