Jessie Levandov | Baby / 2019

der rosenkavalier

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jessie Levandov (screenwriter and director) Baby / 2019 [8 minutes]

 

Jessie Levandov’s 2019 short Baby begins with what critic Chelsea Lupkin describes as “a seemingly innocuous scene, where a group of teens hang out on benches smoking and listening to music, the early imagery…immediately conjur[ing] up assumptions about how these individuals must be somehow ‘tougher’ than your average America.” Some outsiders might seem them as not only “tougher” but “meaner,” but that would simply suggest that they do not know them and cannot read behind the masks these kids must wear in order to survive.

      But even in this first scene wherein one figure goes on about the ribs and rice of the them is eating actually being “rat,” when the central figure on the bench, the teenager Ali (Ali Mian)—sitting with a girl stroking his head and neck—asks for a light for his cigarette and a boy standing just behind him, Solo (Soloman Breland), leans down immediately to provide it, we sense a subtle relationship between the two of them the isn’t apparent even to the others.

     Over the next several frames we follow Ali—who wears a head covering for most the early part of the film—as he visits a Bronx barber where he gets a special “wave” cut for what the barber presumes is a date with his girlfriend and stops by a bodega to pick up a single rose. The musical accompaniment of the song “Baby” sung by Donnie and Joe Emmerson suggests a kind of “romantic feminization” in the perspective of the heavy masculinity required of this Dominican-American boy as he makes his way through the hood. As he struts through the streets, high-fiving friends en route, if nothing else, we observe a gentler, unexpectedly “preening” Ali.

      And when, with rose in hand, he makes his way back to the bench near the basketball court where the action presumably began, finding it empty except for Solo, we realize his date is a one-on-one basketball game played out on what Solo describes as a “brisk” day. For a moment before, they sit side-by-side, Ali handing over the rose not quite as graciously as a Viennese Rosenkavalier, but just as meaningfully as the two gradually inch their hands toward one another—their eyes darting about to make sure no one else is around—to briefly touch. Accomplishing that simple act becomes what director Jessie Levandov describes as “a personal victory,” and they move to the court to play ball with the joyful eagerness of engaging in a sexual act played out in the dance of a sporting scrimmage.

       A long-time teacher of filmmaking in the New York City public high schools, director Levandov worked with her own students in creating the film, using former students and their friends to play the roles in Baby. Levandov comments: “I adore teenagers, I think they’re brilliant. They have so much to say, and it’s such a specific and tender time in one’s life where you’re really trying to figure out how to carve out space for yourself in order to be who you are. I wanted to tell a tender, queer coming-of-age love story that brings you into the world of this particular group of young folks in New York City.”

      Baby was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Short Film at Outfest.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).