Without spoiling anything, there’s a vague implication that women can potentially achieve their dreams if they just accept their lot in life and embrace their maternal instinct, which, considering the deliberately surreal, hyper-critical template of everything preceding, is a tad inverted. Inevitably, the basic narrative machinations of Bang Bang Baby teaches Stepphy, and the audience, a lesson about the seedy, insincere nature of Hollywood dreams, but it also delves into a bit of forced didactic about the role of women in relation to childbearing. What’s particularly problematic is the presentation of gender and the faux-feminism that rears its head in the third act. Somewhere within the campy, self-conscious presentation is a wry, satirical jab at the socio-political, highly moralistic and hypocritical, sensibilities of the ‘60s-noting that all of these styles and genres lead back to the same heteronormative, Judeo-Christian preaching-but it’s secondary to the indulgent flourishes that grow increasingly irrelevant as the plot plunders forward.
None of this would be a problem except that the comedy is never funny, the musical numbers are quite flat and the science fiction never presents as more than a superficial problem. Jules, needing to remind us that the early ‘60s was more than just consumer motivation, musicals and teen fantasies, injects a storyline about a chemical plant leak giving the locals character-specific-morally-conscious-mutations. But rather than examine how Stepphy comes to this realization and what that might mean within the context of modern reflection, Bang Bang Baby focuses on protracted musical numbers and the inherent zaniness of base observational humour about German accents, celebrity phoniness and the juxtaposition of rich city people with drunken small town commoners. This standard-issue, coming-of-age template reaches its obvious state of conflict early when teen heartthrob Bobby Shore ( Justin Chatwin) randomly shows up in town, crashing at her place when his car breaks down.Īs expected, Bobby is a bit of a flake. Stepphy (Jane Levy), a whimsical, idealistic high school student with a penchant for crooning, looks to an American televised singing competition as her mode of escape from small town Canadian life. The story, which blends the faux-aspirational insincerity of the American Dreams/American Idol ethos and the fever-dream sensibilities of Mulholland Drive, is an amalgam of all things pertaining to the 1960s. With his feature film debut, Bang Bang Baby, he’s created a similarly idiosyncratic, insulated world that ultimately succumbs to an inability to account for the demands of a longer, more involved and complex narrative. Jules has demonstrated an aptitude for experimenting with the cinematic form and creating hyper-realized, wildly stylized environments in his short film work.