Nasty Baby

Not hav­ing answers is a new way of liv­ing for me,” said Sebastián Sil­va, Nasty Baby’s writer, direc­tor and lead actor dur­ing a screen­ing intro­duc­tion at the 2015 Berlin Film Fes­ti­val. These words chime per­fect­ly with a film that weaves the social tapes­try of like­able, pro­gres­sive peo­ple in a way that feels com­plex but cel­e­bra­to­ry, until the rug is pulled from under every­thing, turn­ing the film from a breezy queer dra­ma into a casu­al mod­ern masterpiece.

The set­ting is bohemi­an New York and the cam­era rush­es after ener­getic char­ac­ters as they pur­sue goals of mak­ing art and cre­at­ing life. Fred­dy (Sebastián Sil­va), Mo (Tunde Ade­bimpe) and Pol­ly (Kris­ten Wiig) are try­ing for a baby. Fred­dy is an artist. As penance for self-diag­nosed nar­cis­sism at ignor­ing the babies that need adopt­ing in order to make one of his own, he wants to humil­i­ate him­self by imper­son­at­ing a baby in a gallery instal­la­tion called ​‘Nasty Baby’. A cura­tor is inter­est­ed but may just want to see Fred­dy naked and vul­ner­a­ble. The roam­ing cam­era is adept at catch­ing the sug­ges­tion of com­pet­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal inter­ests before words are cho­sen and posi­tions com­mit­ted to.

Pol­ly (played with verve by Kristin Wiig) has bad news. Freddy’s sperm count is too low to impreg­nate her. They ask his boyfriend Mo to step up to the jizz jar. Mo is played by the affa­ble Tunde Ade­bimpe (of TV on the Radio fame). He is the calm rela­tion­ship cen­tre, for Fred­dy is prone to anger and comes close to lash­ing out at The Bish­op (Reg E Cathey), a men­tal­ly ill, tem­pera­men­tal­ly volatile man who roams their street. Mo speaks in the com­i­cal­ly resigned tones of some­one forced by a part­ner to learn the lan­guage of emo­tion­al bar­gain­ing. ​“Use this as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to calm down,” he says as Fred­dy rages at an unex­pect­ed wake-up call from The Bishop.

There is some­thing sit­com-like in the way that Sil­va estab­lish­es deep famil­iar­i­ty, not just with his leads but with the wider ensem­ble. The Bish­op is a recur­rent char­ac­ter – park­ing cars, sell­ing tat and occa­sion­al­ly lob­bing homo­pho­bic abuse. He is kept in check by grand­fa­ther­ly queer, Richard (Mark Mar­go­lis). Sil­va has also cast his broth­er (Agustín Sil­va), Mae­by from Arrest­ed Devel­op­ment (Alia Shawkat) and his actu­al cat – the lat­ter being a play­ful scene-steal­er. An inclu­sive fam­i­ly atmos­phere bur­geons, and with it the sense that we know the para­me­ters of this world. Nasty Baby seems like a slight­ly cool­er-than-nor­mal mum­blecore flick with smart char­ac­ters wrestling with per­son­al aspi­ra­tions and cere­bral struggles.

Then the rug is whipped away. I beseech you to avoid find­ing out what this prac­ti­cal­ly entails. Avoid the treach­er­ous IMDb syn­op­sis. Expe­ri­enc­ing the film organ­i­cal­ly mor­ph­ing from a lo-fi con­cept to a world-encom­pass­ing trea­tise is aston­ish­ing. It’s like the aspect-ratio shift in Xavier Dolan’s Mom­my but on a genre and philo­soph­i­cal lev­el. In the momen­tum and moral con­fu­sion cre­at­ed by this bold expan­sion, Sil­va wres­tles to the ground mas­sive issues while trans­mit­ting a desire for open con­ver­sa­tion as we make our way for­ward into the unknown.