When we’re young, our first loves tend to feel like our only. In Mila’s case, though, as a sixteen-year-old terminally ill girl, the reality of a first and only love is ferociously omnipresent.
Shannon Murphy’s directorial debut Babyteeth is a chaotic whirlwind of haircuts, prescription drugs, parties, life and death. Mila, played by Eliza Scanlen, is not afraid to love hard and fast, to spend all that she’s got in her before she’s no longer able to spend at all. So, when Moses (Toby Wallace), a small-time drug dealer with grazes and tattoos cluttering his face, literally runs into Mila on her way to school, she of course jumps at the chance to forcibly invite Moses into her small life. Small lives are ever widening at age sixteen, but Mila understands the fierce speed that she is to assume in order to live a little wider whilst she can.
Peppered with chapter titles and the occasional fourth wall-breaking camera glance, Murphy doesn’t shy away from the all the quirky, sometimes clichéd, tropes that love to dominate coming of age films. However, Babyteeth is hesitant to be categorised as just another indie teen film. That is to say, the ideas that drive the plot (teen girl dying of cancer) and the themes that carry the story (teen love and, inevitably, teen heartbreak) are not uncommon in the variety of films that have littered our cinema screens and streaming services over the last couple of years (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, The Fault in Our Stars). But what sets Murphy’s debut apart is Babyteeth’s undramatised drama, or perhaps, dramatized reality.
Murphy plays Mila’s cancer not as the film’s only proponent of spectacle, but rather as just another reason for Mila’s willingness to love to take on the bravado and importance it deserves, allowing the romance of it all to assume centre-stage. With only one hospital scene and few references to treatment, the focus remains on all the space in Mila’s life around her illness, the space that she fills with living. This isn’t a story about a kid with cancer, this is a story about a kid in love. Although beware, because teen-love and teen-cancer stories tend to look pretty similar in their endings: someone always ends up heartbroken.
Babyteeth, whilst consumed with the highs and lows of romantic love and all its chaotic tendencies, makes sure to show us the painfully consistent depth of the love from Mila’s parents. At first hesitant to encourage any sort of relationship with Moses, Mila’s parents soon realise the urgency for Mila to grab every wild moment that brushes past her fingertips. They allow Moses to stay in their house, to be a much-needed friend to Mila whilst she’s sick, all while fighting a sickness of his own. If Moses was initially enthusiastic to move in to Mila’s because of her endless supply of prescription drugs, his efforts to get clean and sober speaks to the friendship he found and the reason he stayed.
It’s not often Australian films manage to hit the balance of being both quirky and enjoyable. Our box office is littered with countless local films that either insist on being completely absurd or unsatisfyingly boring, both being almost intolerable to watch. And this stereotype of Australian cinema extends ferociously to films of the coming-of-age genre; it’s a challenge to find a film that actually shows us what it’s like to grow up in this land of sweeping plains. But Babyteeth, with a quirkiness to make you smile and a story to break your heart, manages to surpass any stereotype that halters the Australian teen films that come before it. Shannon Murphy has created a film that both brings us the familiarity of what it is to grow up and to love and to lose and to grieve, but with that she creates a fresh story that our screens haven’t seen before.
4.5/5
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