That obsessive, catalyzing, world-building attention is the subject of Annie Baker’s début film, “Janet Planet.” It follows a single mother, Janet , and her daughter, Lacy , through a hot, green-and-brown-grass summer in western Massachusetts, in 1991. The pair orbit each other—Lacy wants to hold her mother’s hand when she falls asleep, or to keep a strand of her hair—but they are also as lonely as satellites. “I’m actually pretty unhappy, too,” Janet says to Lacy, abstractedly.
What didn’t? In film, you really are making as much material for yourself as you can, in very short, panicked amounts of time, with a large group of people, and, in my case, I was dependent on very faulty 16-mm. cameras. You don’t do a run-through; you don’t see it run through until you’re in the edit. That’s a really interesting problem.