Imagine a female Benjamin Braddock who, unlike Dustin Hoffman’s rudderless graduate, has no trouble getting laid. That’s one way to introduce Danielle (Rachel Sennott), the neurotic heroine, adrift at the precipice of adulthood, in Emma Seligman’s promising debut Shiva Baby.
At the shiva where nearly the entire film unspools in more or less real time — the deceased is a family friend of little consequence — Danielle finds herself genially grilled by so many well-intentioned grown-ups concerned about her unorthodox academic choices and lack of career prospects that I half-expected one of them to suggest plastics.
Eking her way through her senior year of college without a major, and with fuzzy ambitions to become an actor or comedian or feminist thought leader or some hybrid of the three, vocational ambitions are, for Danielle, the least of her concerns on this day. Unbeknownst to her needling parents (Fred Melamed and Polly Draper, in fine, bickering fettle), she has been meeting strangers through a sugar daddy app as a way to supplement her meager income from babysitting.
It just so happens that Max (Danny Deferrari), her sugar arrangement from earlier in the day, shows up at the shiva unexpectedly, with his blonde, entrepreneurial, practically airbrushed shiksa wife Kim (Dianna Agron) — and baby — in tow.
Complicating matters is the presence of Maya (Molly Gordon), Danielle’s high school girlfriend whom she hasn’t seen in years, and who unlike our protagonist is on an auspicious track to law school. The tension between them, and between Danielle and everybody else, is thick enough to cut with a bagel knife.
The result is an eccentric and difficult-to-classify debut, a psychic horror film masquerading as a kvetching comedy. Shiva Baby is least successful when it indulges in the latter. Writerly rim shots like “you look like Gwyneth Paltrow on food stamps — and not in a good way” sound too artificial to be cringe-y, and are low-hanging fruit compared to the genuinely uncomfortable places Seligman takes us later.
For Danielle, the shiva becomes a living nightmare, gradually darkening the initially broad comedic overtures one yammering yenta, buttonholing relative and duplicitous paramour at a time. This is where Seligman’s claustrophobic direction tells the story more bracingly than does her own screenplay. One filmmaker might view the prodding questions from the shiva’s guests as a lighthearted leitmotif; Seligman films them like predators buzzing around Danielle in noxious hives, invading her personal space.
As Danielle begins to unravel, Seligman swathes the film in subjective crimson hues, not unlike Antonioni’s use of the title color in Red Desert, to the point where subjective and objective realities blur. Central to this beguiling atmosphere is Ariel Marx’s unnerving score, one that arguably invents an oxymoronic genre: edgy klezmer. Fidgety and unadorned, it’s composed of handclap percussion and strings, which pierce each scene as if drawing blood. We imagine the musicians on their perches in Danielle’s head, calculating the time for the next dissonant pluck with surgical precision.
None of this is to say that humor is not a consistent throughline; it is, and Jewish families will recognize the accurate archetypes on display throughout, and the malapropisms that almost function as inside jokes. (Instead of a traditional Jewish dessert pastry, Kim asks for an “arugula” instead.) Shiva Baby quite simply transcends them, creating a stylistic chimera that’s equal parts Noah Baumbach and Roman Polanski.
If that’s not enough of a selling point, Shiva Baby may be the first film I’ve seen to treat sugar relationships as one in a spectrum of acceptable romantic and sexual transactions and not as glorified whoredom. Seligman, who shares fundamentals in common with Danielle as a young bisexual Jewish woman, certainly doesn’t judge her avatar, and neither should we.
Sugaring is a way of reclaiming a degree of power in the patriarchy. In this way, by the end perhaps she is not so much Benjamin Braddock but Mrs. Robinson — pursuing what she wants, taboos be damned.
SHIVA BABY. Director: Emma Seligman; Cast: Rachel Sennott, Molly Gordon, Dany Deferrari, Polly Draper, Fred Melamed, Dianna Agron; Distributor: MUBI; Not rated; playing at at Cobb Theatres Downtown at the Gardens in Palm Beach Gardens, CMX Cinemas 17 in Miami Lakes, CMX Brickell City Center in Miami and streaming on Amazon Prime