Babygirl (Macdara Vallely, 2012) Ireland, USA

Reviewed by Robin Eriksson. Viewed at Santa Barbara International Film Festival, 2013.

Lena is on the verge of sixteen and lives with her mother Lucy and baby half-brother in the Bronx. Her father is out of the picture and George, the father of her half-brother, gets arrested within the first ten minutes of the movie. Lena has watched her mother fall in and out of relationships with various men. But soon Lucy meets Victor, a younger man who is about midway between Lucy and Lena’s ages.  Lena dislikes Victor and feels uncomfortable around him because his eyes always seem to wander in her direction. But when Mom’s latest boy toy Victor quickly proves to be her worst suitor yet, Lena wants to set up a trap to expose him for the creep she thinks he is.

However, She’s afraid to tell her mother, and this initial reluctance proves a big mistake as Victor becomes a regular part of her life. Lena starting to get panic, and she’s up for trying anything as long as it helps her mother. Passive and aggressive flirting at the same time results in Victor making a bald faced play, he’ll leave Lena’s mother if it means he can date her. Without thinking it over, Lena says yes. What she wasn’t prepared for was Victor’s persistence, which complicates her life in ways she never could have anticipated. At the same time Lena meets a boy in her own age and actually starting to like him. But she can not really think about him because all of her thoughts is about how to get Victor away from her mother.

Lucy and Lena’s mother/daughter relationship is very realistic, as though Lucy calls Lena her “best friend” she is still her mother and in a lot of ways less mature than her daughter.  Lena is sixteen, but is wise beyond her years from dealing with the fallout of her mother’s relationships.  There are thousands of young women who, like Lena, are distrustful of men because they never had a positive male influence on their lives. Babygirl shows how that lack of influence can be damaging.