Coming-of-age movies have become a genre inextricable from the fantasies of youth, to the point where contemporary discourse around genre projects like Euphoria and Lady Bird tends to focus on whether or not the genre still remains reflective of the experiences of its target audience. Baby, Don’t Cry from writer/producer/star Zita Bai, however, embraces the paradoxes of the genre to create something wholly unique. The film follows 17-year-old high-schooler and DIY filmmaker Baby (Bai) as she kicks off an intense, whirlwind relationship with 20-year-old hard-living punk Fox (Vas Provatakis). The film follows the ups-and-downs of their relationship, contrasted against the chaos of Baby’s home life with her strict mother. What deems Baby, Don’t Cry noteworthy among its peers is its willingness to twist coming-of-age tropes, as well as Bai’s clever ability to weave magical realism into her story.
One of the most immediate and curious quirks the film exhibits is its sparseness. The setting is mainly sub-urban, often falling into the liminal space of side streets outside local high schools and corner stores just inside the city. It’s not quite a small-town story, yet not a big-city one either, often leaving the scenery feeling empty, or too big for the characters in subtle yet effective ways. A similar sparseness is exhibited in the dialogue, with Baby rarely speaking, and her time with Fox often underscored by physicality instead of conversation.
Fox opens a new world to Baby, though it may not be one Baby belongs to. Their early relationship, comprising most of the film’s first act, culminates in a jarring scene in which Fox holds one of Baby’s classmates at gunpoint after the classmate previously confronted Baby about stealing her wallet. The scene highlights the peaks of the film’s strengths and weaknesses quite well, as the intensity of emotion and action between Baby and Fox unveils Bai and Provatakis’ undeniable chemistry. However, the almost preposterous circumstances of the scene underline issues with the film’s pacing and uncertain relationship to the “realism” of “magical realism.”
Bai’s film soaks itself in strange magic, with many of its alterations from the course of reality manifesting as subtle displays of the interiority of her writing. Throughout the film, Baby’s mother (Helen Sun) appears as a human-pig hybrid, with pointed ears, a pink tracksuit, and a series of snorts and squeals that accompany her dialogue. This depiction strengthens the fable-esque construction of the movie, especially when it comes to Baby’s relationship to her mother. The piglike appearance is revealed to come from Baby’s deeply-rooted disgust with her mother as a result of her treatment of Baby’s father. Family ties are always more complicated than they seem, and the touches of magic that director Jesse Dvorak brings to screen emphasize that well. After all, it is only within her home and with her mother that Baby keeps in touch with her Chinese heritage; otherwise, she is with Fox, and the two always occupy their own microcosm of chaos.
However, even Baby’s cultural and blood ties are knotted up in the film’s final sequence, a visually shocking and visceral symbol of the pressures of assimilation: Baby’s mother cuts the tips of ears with scissors, ranting about how her and Baby don’t belong, will never belong here, and should leave to return to somewhere Baby doesn’t know or recognize. What follows further complicates matters. Baby’s mother tries to kill her, only for Fox to arrive to rescue her, and Baby kills her mother in self-defense. When the couple flees, finally able to run like they’ve always dreamed of, the same bizarre magic returns – Fox vanishes from the driver’s seat of his Jeep, transforming into a cartoon of a fox running alongside their car. Baby watches him run, now the only passenger in a driverless Jeep headed to nowhere.
The magical elements of the story, especially when it comes to Baby’s mother, highlight another important aspect of the film: its ability to thrive as a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing. Often, Baby, Don’t Cry seems to adopt tropes and clichés of genre and archetypes, only to reveal something much darker underneath. The tense relationship between mother and daughter, both isolated from those around them because of their race and culture, is revealed to be a not so black-and-white version of a story about solidarity, heritage, and the pressures of otherness. Their relationship ends in violence rather than newfound understanding, largely because this is not only a story about a universal experience of otherness. It is Bai’s personal story, one that makes no excuses for parental abuse.
Similarly, the film subverts much of the conventions that accompany its designation as a coming-of-age movie. Baby and Fox’s relationship isn’t something to be held up on a pedestal, only for the viewer to realize years later it might not have been as good as it seems, but instead a truthful vision of the messiness of young relationships. The couple’s sexual tension, and the movie’s overt sexuality, prove this. Moments of heightened eroticism, be it Baby learning to masturbate, or a messy first time in the passenger seat of Fox’s black Jeep, are often followed by blood. Bai and Dvorak use sexuality like a hammer, brutal and messy, something that gets the job done but only in the most destructive way possible.
Violence as a whole is never far from their relationship, even at its best: montages of the couple having fun that call back to the endless catalog of coming-of-age movies Baby, Don’t Cry subverts are cut short by another punk taking revenge for one of Fox’s many aggressive stunts, beating him while Baby is kicked by the same girl Fox held at gunpoint. Unlike others in the genre, the consequences of their actions are never far either. Violence also accompanies them into their personal sphere, where sex becomes a way of breaking down the emotional barriers between them. Their relationship is notably unhealthy and visually portrayed as such, as their tumultuous relationship seems to come to a head with a tearful Baby begging an angry Fox, “Can we please fuck it out?”
The entire context of their relationship subverts the fantastical, star-crossed perfection of young love in other coming-of-age movies as well. Fox cheats, oversteps boundaries, and gets Baby to start smoking, yet she always comes back to him. She stops going to class, gets in fights with her mother, gives up everything for him in a confused, teenaged vision of true love. The entirety of their relationship is deeply flawed, and yet, far more truthful to the reality of young love and teenage relationships. As a whole, Bai’s script and Dvorak’s direction work hand-in-hand to preserve the film’s humanity, painting a harsh-lined picture of the calamities of youth that speaks to even the most straight-laced among us.
Baby, Don’t Cry is an honest and visceral experience of youthfulness and isolation, one that blends elements of magical realism and experimental filmmaking to encompass the messiness of growing up. Though it stumbles through its slow first act, the film remains a challenging and inventive addition to the coming-of-age genre, with much more in common with Smithereens than The Breakfast Club.
