Baby Ruby
Written and directed by Bess Wohl
Rating: ***
As a newly- turned mother, Noémie Merlant in Baby Ruby rips the screen apart with smothered screams of protest against the pain of postpartum depression.
For decades, cinema all across the world has glorified motherhood as the ultimate nirvanic experience for womanhood. But what if your baby is a “crier”. What if she weeps non-stop, all day all night, like Ruby does? Wouldn’t you think she hates her mother?
French actress Noémie Merlant shows us what it is like to be trapped in the incubator of parental intimacy, begging for just a brief reprieve from the demands of breastfeeding, burping, diaper changing, walking the baby to sleep…Baby Ruby is frightening experience. It turns all the elegies and lullabies into a mockable myth, without sneering at the characters or their predicament.
After a difficult pregnancy and delivery, Jo brings her baby home. Her husband Spencer(Kit Harrington) is supportive and eager to be an active parent. But the baby’s demands spiral out of hand and soon Jo is reduced to a bundle of nerves. Her paranoia makes it impossible for us to tell if she is dreaming or screaming while awake.
Debutant director Bess Wohl builds Jo’s growing hysteria into a storm of surreal images. In one sequence she and her baby are pursued by a fleet of mothers with their babies in prams. Is that really happening? Or is that Jo’s heightened imagination?
Towards the end she is on the verge of being institutionalized. Have her husband and mother-in-law(Jayne Atkinson) plotted Jo’s downfall?
Reality becomes increasingly hard to identify. What we get eventually from the rubble of shattered myths on motherhood is a performance by Noémie Merlant that doesn’t sort out the lines between myth and reality. Instead she goes with the flaw, every blemish in Jos’s attitude to motherhood is given a fair space to breathe.The only comparable performance of a postpartum depressive was Charlize Theron in Tully. And her baby problems were comparatively child’s play.