Capsule: Chuck Chuck Baby
They Don’t Sing Their Hearts Out, They Just Sing Their Hearts
Give Louise Brealey this: In singing along to I Am I Said, she brings more emotional validity to the song than Neil Diamond ever did. Playing a woman, Helen, stuck in the dead-endest of dead-ends – working the night shift at a chicken packing plant; living with her ex-husband, his girlfriend and their baby while tending to her ailing, and considerably more sympathetic, mother-in-law – she brings such anger and grief into her rendition that it stabs at the heart. This is before her high-school crush, former bad-girl Joanne (Annabel Scholey), reenters her life and offers her the prospect of rekindling a courtship that, as teens, they didn’t dare enact in full.
In mounting the romantic comedy Chuck Chuck Baby as a quasi-fantasy in which characters sing their hearts out to diegetic music spilling from record players and boom boxes, writer/director Janis Pugh treads a careful line between artifice and reality. Choreographed moments don’t veer off into Gene Kelly-land, and it feels like when the lovers sing, they’re giving true voice to their feelings. If only Pugh had been a little more daring in her plot structure – the beats are predictable, including the introduction of a rather flimsy plot complication to drive to two women apart for the third act; and the needle-drops can occasionally be a little too on-the-nose.
But the performances are overall engaging – including Celyn Jones as Helen’s shit of an ex-spouse and Emily Fairn as his ditzy baby-mama – and there’s sweetness in the support Helen and Jo get from their peer group (excluding those act three spoilsports). And any film that incorporates Janis Ian’s great From Me to You and turns Minnie Ripperton’s Les Fleurs into a paean to the joys of cunnilingus is showing a daring that overrides its more stock elements.
Chuck Chuck Baby isn’t a radical deconstruction of filmic romance, but in its own, humble way, it breaks new ground in its portrayal of how the world is (slowly) growing into a more accepting stance toward love in all its forms. It’s a joyful, musical embrace of our better natures, and a happy experience throughout.