We’re big fans of playwright Annie Baker’s work — The Flick is one hell of a play — and she’s essentially the poet laureate of being down, out and depressed in the western half of the state we call home. So, it makes a certain kind of sense that the same studio that took Celine Song from stage-to-screen would release Baker’s debut film, Janet Planet, around the same time. Get ready, because A24’s going to make you have those sad girl summer feels all over again. The studio dropped a trailer for Baker’s film earlier on Thursday, and boy howdy, is it going to be weird to watch this in front of Civil War next week.
Take a look:
In lieu of a proper A24 synopsis, here’s what the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who hosted the East Coast premiere of the film back at last falls NYFF, has to say about it:
“It’s the summer before Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) starts sixth grade, and she is spending the lazy months with her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in their home in the woods. As the months drift by, the bespectacled, taciturn girl, fiercely observant, watches Janet and three enigmatic adults who drift in and out of their lives, whether romantic interests or reconnected friends. Set in 1991 rural Western Massachusetts, the superb debut film from Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Annie Baker is a work of surreal tranquility that moves at a different, lost pace of life, and which perceives heartbreak just as Lacy is beginning to grasp the world and her place in it. Baker has created a film about a mother and daughter quite unlike any other, heightening the viewer’s senses and expressing oceans of feeling with the smallest gestures. Nicholson and Ziegler perform their roles with an inspiring lack of sentimentality, and the wondrous supporting cast includes Elias Koteas, Sophie Okonedo, and Will Patton. An A24 release.”
Janet Planet hits theaters on June 21.