(Credits: Far Out / BAC Films)

Babysitter is a strange, absurdist comedy whose unlikely theme is misogyny, as purposely silly and cartoonish as the subject matter is serious. The French language feature provides a tongue-in-cheek account of one man’s unlikely journey from unthinking sexism and objectification of women to a more enlightened attitude. However, the improvements he congratulates himself on are highlighted, and eventually complicated, by the women in his life – most particularly by the title character, the mysterious nanny who cares for his infant daughter.

Director Monia Chokri takes a new and different direction with Babysitter. Her previous film, A Brother’s Love (released as La Femme de Mon Frere), was a more straightforward comedy-drama, a touching exploration of siblings’ changing relationship, and a critical success which took the 2019 ‘Un Certain Regard Jury Favourite’ award at Cannes. This latest feature also examines relationships but from a farcical and often surreal perspective. The satire is sharper, the story weirder, and the characters move from realistic to almost mythological as the plot develops. 

The film opens with the central character Cedric (Patrick Hiyon) and a male friend at a boxing match, where they frequently pause from cheering the bout to jovially rate young women in the crowd on the standard 1-to-10 scale. Their attitude is parodied in a dreamlike scene that caricatures gender types, alternating slow-motion glimpses of voluptuous round-card girls in bikinis with shots of two muscular boxers viciously pummelling each other over an enormous smear of blood. The film quickly moves on to the critical event: a video of Cedric at the boxing match, impulsively embracing a female journalist, has gone viral and exposed him to harsh criticism and accusations of sexual harassment. Cedric’s insistence that “it was just a joke” seems to fall flat, and his brother Jean-Michel (Steve Laplante) arrives to counsel him.

Chokri’s script lets no one, male or female, escape mockery, ridiculing Cedric’s cluelessness and casual sexism, but also his brother’s self-congratulatory claims of being an enlightened man who has moved past conventional views of women. As Jean-Michel lectures Cedric and leads him on a hilariously zealous therapeutic journey, their plans of publishing a letter of apology expand into an ambitious scheme to co-write a book, a candid, ill-conceived memoir about “how society made me a misogynist”. While the two men are caught up in their creative project, the women in the household are enduring their own issues, largely unnoticed by the two brothers. Cedric’s wife, Nadine, goes through a series of mishaps and struggles, resulting in her being unemployed and on crutches in the background of her husband’s creative frenzy.

The action begins to scale up when the couple hires a nanny, Amy (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), to look after their baby while the exhausted Nadine tries to recuperate and return to work. Amy seems designed to complicate the storyline. While very good with the baby, at first glance, she is young, ridiculously and stereotypically feminine in dress and manner, apparently shallow and silly. As the story progresses, she becomes more mysterious and is shown to be strangely insightful about what each member of the household needs and wants. She deftly draws out each character’s inner reality and motivations, one by one, in ways that are funny but startling. Amy, confidently portrayed by Tereszkiewicz, turns out to be not only more than meets the eye, but she also acts as a catalyst for every other character’s growth and understanding through various forms of deception, fantasy, and carefully chosen costumes and props, all presented in the same zany, surreal style as the rest of the film.

From here, unfortunately, the action winds down into a vague and scattered finale. Babysitter is consistently funny, for its burlesque version of serious topics, but also for Chokri’s peculiar visuals, which offer non-verbal commentary to the dialogue – as in a scene that moves abruptly from the cleavage of dancing girls to the discordantly realistic and functional breasts of Nadine as she nurses her baby; or in camera shots that place pertinent objects or body parts intrusively in the immediate foreground. The acting is designed to be exaggerated, the characters a bit outlandish, and their foibles consistently ridiculous, an approach that works in general, especially thanks to the well-chosen cast of comedic actors, but becomes strained over the length of an entire film. What detracts from the film still more is that the concept becomes muddled and the message unclear well before the conclusion. It is a flawed but interesting and fun modern morality tale and comedy of errors.