Throughout Baby/Girls, the latest documentary from filmmakers Alyse Walsh and Jackie Jesko, the tension between the political and the personal is impossible to escape, even with a cinema vérité approach to the material. As the camera tries to remain an unobtrusive observer of three pregnant teenage girls, deeper questions remain unprobed and haunt the entire movie. It’s understandable that the documentary would give the girls, all living at a Christian maternity home called Compassion House in Arkansas, some space to tell their own stories. The best kind of observational documentaries, like Les Blank’s Chulas Fronteras, take a backseat to let their subjects elucidate their lives through insightful interviews and follow their day-to-day life. Baby/Girls tries to employ the same structure, using one-on-one interviews and an omnipresent camera, but the effect here is more elusive. Throughout the documentary, we hear from the workers at Compassion House, the friends and families of the girls at the center of the film, and the girls themselves, but still can’t get a total grasp on their inner lives.
Throughout the documentary, there are ripe opportunities to delve into the underlying circumstances behind the issues the girls are facing, before and after pregnancy. We meet Olivia, Grace, and Ariana, and learn about their family lives while tracing their paths before, during, and after becoming mothers. It’s a sobering journey, told with real empathy for the girls. A shy smile or soft-spoken joke hints at their real ages, grounding the film’s emphasis on the stark reality that children are raising children. To the movie’s credit, the filmmakers clearly approached their subjects with care and empathy during a vulnerable time in their lives, and it shows in the way the girls are filmed and questioned. They are never pushed too much, and for good reason.
The ambiguity is ethical, but purposeful, too. During the Q&A at the film’s premiere during SXSW, the filmmakers emphasized that they wanted the film to be “more observational than political.” It comes through, in ways both interesting and ineffective. Interviews with Crystal, a Compassion House worker, are where this tension is most striking. At one point, Crystal reflects on the fears she had as a teenage mother, and reveals how she thinks women should have a choice – even if she can’t tell the girls in her care this because of Compassion House’s Christian foundation. The movie doesn’t get explicitly into the political ideologies of the people at its center beyond this. The resulting opaqueness can be frustrating in a post-Dobbs world, and holds the movie and its subjects back from further development beyond the surface. While there is talk of the cyclical nature of teen pregnancy, the absence of sex education, and even the girls’ difficult home lives, it is talked of enough to build context, but not depth.
Olivia, Grace, and Ariana make up the heart of the film, though, and watching their journey from pregnancy through postpartum is both compelling and devastating. The end cards, explaining where the girls are at now, feels very neat and tidy, even though life is anything but. Baby/Girls is doing important work chronicling the girls’ lives, even if it could stand to dig deeper into its politics.review here
