Motherhood changes everything. Or that’s the received wisdom anyway. However, Eden – Ilana Glazer, who also co-wrote the film and rattles out her lines with a flip, crackling energy that veers between the scatological and the screwball – didn’t get that particular memo. A freewheeling, terminally single yoga teacher from Astoria, Queens, she is not about to let an unplanned baby derail her life. Her personality (large, loud, tirelessly hedonistic) is stamped on to every aspect of her pregnancy. Her birth plan features helium balloons and tiaras; she has already compiled a Spotify playlist of party bangers for the delivery room. And holding her hand through it all, Eden assumes, will be her best friend since childhood, Dawn (Michelle Buteau).
But Dawn has a demanding career and family of her own: a newborn whose birth provides the extended comic set piece that opens the film (and sets its forthright tone), and a three-year-old who is dabbling in satanism after Eden’s unorthodox babysitting (she lets him watch The Omen). Dawn is one exploding nappy away from a meltdown. She has, to put it bluntly, more than enough shit to deal with without Eden’s contribution.
The feature directing debut of Pamela Adlon (co-creator, director and star of the US comedy series Better Things), Babes casts a wry, unflinching eye on the grisly indignities of pregnancy, birth and its seismic aftermath. The film addresses, with a macabre, lip-smacking relish, the realities that most cinema tends to gloss over when it comes to the subject of new motherhood: nipples chafed to the texture of corned beef, every last nerve shredded to raffia, and a postpartum body that feels as though somebody drove a combine harvester through it. It’s caustically funny, albeit wincingly uncomfortable at times. Where the film really excels is not so much in the snappy, trash-talking vag banter, but in the perceptive depiction of the gear changes in a female friendship as the besties start to realise that their paths might be diverging.
It’s this element, plus the irrepressible chemistry between Glazer (co-creator and star of Broad City) and Buteau (First Wives Club, Survival of the Thickest), that sets Babes apart from similarly themed pictures about unplanned pregnancies. There’s a kinship with Baby Done, the affable New Zealand comedy starring Rose Matafeo as a tree surgeon in denial about her impending motherhood; and, in the New York location and abrasive humour, with the Jenny Slate-starring indie picture Obvious Child. And Babes shares with Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up a taste for magic mushrooms and an occasional tendency to lean on raunchiness and shock tactics in place of wit.
But while these other films focus on pregnancy from the viewpoint of the prospective parents (who tend to end up as a couple even if they weren’t at the point of conception), the father of Eden’s baby, Claude (If Beale Street Could Talk star Stephan James), is abruptly removed from the equation. It’s a plot device that should be tragic but is defused by the sly absurdity of the scene in which we learn of his fate. This is a tonal gamble – it’s quite a switch in comedic register after the uproarious and maximalist labour scene that opens proceedings – but it’s one that Adlon carries off with confidence and style.
It’s clearly not an accident that Babes references Nora Ephron at one point. While its dialogue is rather more graphically gynaecological than any of Ephron’s peppy romcoms, there’s a sense, in the fleshed out characters, the knotty relationship dynamics and the acutely observed comedy, that Adlon and writers Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz are on the same page as Ephron, with the same droll humanism and warmth.
It won’t work for everyone. Some audience members may prefer a more kid gloves treatment of female anatomy. And Glazer’s full-bore assault technique when it comes to acting is a potential stumbling block for others. There’s little opportunity to catch a breath during the rapid-fire onslaught of dialogue. She is certainly, as the character herself admits, “a lot”. Ultimately, however, Babes disarms us with an unexpectedly heartfelt conclusion and a message that friendships, like marriages, are worth working for. And any movie that takes such extravagant and destructive revenge on a breast pump gets my vote.
• In UK and Irish cinemas
