Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby is a confused and hectic debut that follows a young woman, Danielle (Rachel Sennott), who is in the shaky year post-graduation where one has to contend with employment and both the financial and social pressure to chase it even if you’re not sure how you’d be fulfilled by most available jobs. As her parents are rich and generous, Danielle is mostly subjected to the second kind of pressure. But two obstacles are preventing her from being a self-assured young person. One, she’s a creative graduating into a society that offers few ways to survive with dignity as an artist (people around Danielle consistently patronise her creative ambitions), and two, she’s extremely disconnected from her romantic and sexual desires (she’s portrayed as being virtually unable to communicate with the one person she apparently wants to connect to). Like Ben Braddock in The Graduate (1967), Danielle feels stuck, a child among adults. Panic and ego death naturally set in when she has to spend an afternoon facing old friends of her very Jewish family, joining her parents to visit a bereaved member of their community as part of shiva, the traditional week-long mourning period that takes place after a relative dies. Also attending is everyone who has watched her grow up and cares for her, and who consequently besiege her with questions, demanding to know the details of a life Danielle feels lost in.
The most interesting part of the film is the mystery (which Seligman largely leaves unaddressed) of what has kept the Danielle we see on-screen from being a Danielle she’d be comfortable with, even after four years away from her slightly claustrophobic family. Danielle is a young queer woman and a sex worker, using a Sugar Daddy app to connect with potential clients, although we only ever hear about one. We first meet Danielle with this client, Max, having clothed sex in an apartment decorated in neutral tones. It doesn’t matter that Seligman focuses on a ringing phone in the foreground instead of the place’s interior details, as they’re unimportant; we’ve all seen the bamboo-minimalism thing as a signifier of wealth in catalogues, coffee shops, and the lobbies of luxury buildings like this one. The sex Danielle has is similarly generic, out of focus, with no close-up shots that reveal any flesh or emotion. From the sound of it, that’s because the sex is as predictable as the apartment, and seemingly irrelevant to our protagonist. Seligman’s style here, sticking us in the middle of the act and obscuring it, makes me think of a complaint made by filmmaker Lizzie Borden during a 1989 interview with Scott MacDonald about her film Working Girls. In it she explains that it was critical for her to film the economics comprising “this ritualistic exchange of goods” (i.e. sex work) – preparations, precautions, the act, cleanup – because other filmmakers hadn’t honoured them visually, preferring instead to leave the actual labour of prostitution ambiguous, to the imagination.[1] It’s unclear who the porn-y “yeah Daddy”s coming from the couch are for – Max’s benefit, or Danielle’s? – and this ties back to Shiva Baby‘s central ambiguity, which is why Danielle is using the app at all. She later implies that she feels unappreciated and powerless and relies on her male clients to help with this. We also don’t know why she hasn’t been pursuing other support and connection, except that she maybe likes her client Max.
I can understand her confusion to an extent. Sex work is labour, and the relationship between a sex worker and a client is not any more likely to meet that the worker’s emotional needs than any buyer-seller relationship. But sex work and sugaring (referred to interchangeably by most on the film’s review circuit) are broad categories, sometimes overlapping. [2] The idea of being a sugar baby is a popular one among those who don’t necessarily need the income to survive, but who maybe want it for lifestyle reasons. It was attractive to me for this reason in college, as it was to Emma Seligman, who’s familiar with the phenomenon as a young, NYC college graduate herself.[3] And since there are all kinds of roles for a sugar baby to play (those who put out ads for sugar babies on websites seek companions, conversation partners, ambitious young people to mentor), someone feeling lost might expect a role like this to fulfil some of the needs they don’t know how to meet themselves. I suspect this is true of Danielle. She’s certainly not financially reliant on her client: Max turns out to be her father’s former employee, so Danielle’s “extra cash” is already in her family.
When Danielle tells Max she’s off to see another client, although she’s really going to the funeral reception, he tries to make their parting less blatantly transactional by adjusting the trade – he gives her an expensive bracelet, but forgets to proffer the cash. After Danielle reminds him that he owes her money, too, he pulls her close and nuzzles her. Earnestness is allowed on his side of this dynamic, but neither person is earnest here. Max makes an uncomfortable speech about wanting to help Danielle through law school (a lie she’s told him), but given the bracelet and cuddling this speech reads more as a cue for Danielle to give him affection than a genuine desire to help. Danielle performs awkwardly, arching her back when Max encircles her in an embrace, her face as far from his as possible, before she remembers the rules of the sugar baby and then goes in for a kiss. Her hand, though, still flutters resignedly at his back, avoiding holding Max like he’s holding her. The power dynamic between the two is unclear, as the real currency at play is respect and connection, something which neither of them is getting. Danielle has cut off the possibility of connection by pretending to be someone she’s not, though she probably thinks this is the version of herself deserving of respect. Max, who’s secretly married, is doing the same thing for a different reason.
When Danielle meets up with her parents, we see that Max isn’t the only person to whom she lies as a way to avoid being seen as lacking. As her parents breezily debrief the white lies she’ll tell to other shiva-attendees (Danielle participates reluctantly, she’ll tell them she’s got “some interviews lined up”) it’s clear she’s a prospect-less post-grad in a community obsessed with achievement. But Danielle herself doesn’t know what she wants, or even if she wants anything, and once inside the shiva host’s home, her feeling of being backed into a corner grows. Seligman’s shots of Sennott become more and more shallowly focused, while the rest of the world becomes hazy, and a jarring, continuous klezmer-inspired score helps panic pervade. The source of Danielle’s crisis? Who shows up but Max, his entrepreneurial, goyim wife and – surprise! – their baby as well as Maya, Danielle’s ex-lover from high school. Evasion is impossible in the cramped, crowded living area, and each encounter is increasingly fraught. In an awkward three-way conversation between Max, Maya, and Danielle, Maya announces that they went to prom together, “fucked,” and that she gave Danielle “her first orgasm.” Unlike Danielle, Maya is actually law school-bound and as this was Danielle’s stated reason for being a sugar baby, it smarts for Max to find this out. He rubs it in her face: “Oh, you’re the one going to law school!” he says to Maya. Throughout the shiva everybody attacks Danielle, and the only presented motives are Maya’s jealousy – Maya tells Max that “Danielle’s parents pay for everything” so she can do her “art thing” – and Max’s anger at being caught cheating: his wife, Kim, inevitably picks up on his weirdness towards Danielle (they also have the same bracelet) and goes on the offensive.
Feeling like she needs to lie to her own community, though, leaves Danielle alone, and this is maybe why she doesn’t leave Max alone, seeking affirmation of her desirability even after being caught lying. At least, this is the generous reading: Seligman gives us plenty of reasons as to why Danielle feels insecure, but few as to why a desire to sleep with Max might be her salvation. Danielle’s real competition is Maya. “Are you like, thrilled to be here with your peak audience?” Danielle asks her at one point, and soon after Maya says that “a business woman who’s so stressed out, but you can’t tell,” like Max’s wife, is, like, “#goals”, Danielle turns back to sex appeal. She sends Max nudes from the bathroom and, in a scene of painful rejection, tries to give him a blowjob in the bathroom before he stops her, chuckles and walks out. Ultimately everything is too much for Danielle and she breaks down. This is fair – nobody takes her passions seriously, and it doesn’t seem like she does either. At the film’s end, Danielle sobs, “I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m going to do” and hugs her mother, who assures her that everything will be okay – she’ll find a job and fall in love (with a man). In the next scene, Maya asks Danielle why she’s a sugar baby and Danielle halfheartedly tells her, “power and appreciation,” though it doesn’t seem as though it is working. After this exchange, Danielle’s father insists on driving everyone – Max, wife, baby, Danielle, and Maya – home. Squished together in the backseat, Maya holds Danielle’s hand, and they smile at each other despite the discomfort filling the car. The movie ends.
But Shiva Baby raises problems that can’t be solved with a hand hold between women in the backseat of a car. We learn nothing about what those four years between Danielle having sex with Maya and now, about to graduate, were like. But somehow a girl like Danielle, with artistic freedom, resources, a private university degree, and mostly-supportive parents (her mother seems vaguely biphobic, bragging about having gaydar but angry with Danielle for “experimenting”), feels disaffected, powerless and trapped. Shiva Baby could gesture towards something, but doesn’t, leaving “sex work” as a merely decorative part of the film that nonetheless tries to be its centre. In the end, Danielle lacks the second of two requirements which “have emerged for good sex,” as Katherine Angel writes: “consent and self-knowledge”,[4] and so in some ways the film feels like it embodies the modern feminism that Angel describes, which prioritises “poses of sassy confidence” and prompts girls and women to act like they know what they want before they do.[5] This ultimately silences the vulnerabilities and intricacies of their own processes of self-exploration: when Maya and her mother make comments about Danielle being “a future women’s march organiser,” the irony is that modern feminism has failed Danielle. That The Times of Israel felt able to call the film “the next great Jewish movie,” naming the the scene where Danielle kisses the books of prayer as the “literal embrace of the steadying comfort of her Judaism”[6], speaks to Shiva Baby’s lack of focus and ultimately disorienting message. Seligman shows us a young woman with a weak sense of the self, gestures to the systems at play that make it so (namely liberal feminism), and then asks us to accept a moment of spiritual sentiment – a hand-hold between women – as a sign that our lost protagonist is on the path to happiness at last.
[1] Scott MacDonald and Lizzie Borden, Feminist Studies (Feminist Studies, Inc., Summer, 1989).
[2] The Daily Beast, The Cut, and IndieWire, for example.
[3] Matthew Jacobs and Emma Seligman, “Meet the Young Queer Director Behind ‘Shiva Baby’,” The Cut, April 6, 2021.
[4] Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (London: Verso Books, 2021).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Jordan Hoffman, “The Next Great ‘Jewish Movie’…”, The Times of Israel, April 2, 2021.