Babes (15)

Yoga teacher Eden and dentist Dawn are lifelong best friends. When Dawn goes into labour, Eden offers wise-cracking support to herald the safe arrival of a baby girl named Melanie. On her way home from the birth via New York's subway system, Eden meets actor Claude and they sleep together. He subsequently ghosts Eden and when a pregnancy test confirms her nagging intuition, she proceeds with the pregnancy with Dawn as steadfast support.

LondonNet Film Review

Babes (15) Film Review from LondonNet

The title of director Pamela Adlon’s raucous and touching comedy refers not only to mewling newborns, which strain the sisterly bonds between two best friends, but also to the characters’ proud and unapologetic reclamation of a slang term for attractive young women. Written by actor Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, Babes is a gloriously filthy-minded platonic love story between gal pals, who experience very different but equally hilarious journeys through motherhood…

Glazer and co-star Michelle Buteau exude the warmth and familiarity of unabashedly vulgar thirtysomethings, who have been confidants for decades and habitually text each other while they sit on the toilet. The laughter quotient approaches the dizzying heights of Bridesmaids in barnstorming set pieces including a snort-inducing birth that establishes the film’s fixation with bodily fluids and vivid descriptions of a dilating cervix.

Elsewhere, a glutinous mochi rice cake is expertly summarised as “a disembodied testicle”, a night of magic mushroom-fuelled hallucinations is a delirious delight, and Glazer and Rabinowitz’s script relishes the aftermath of a four-year-old child being exposed to a devilish 15-certificate horror film. Adlon’s picture is less sure-footed in serious conversations such as one woman’s awkward reunion with her estranged agoraphobic father (Oliver Platt) and an unexpected hammer blow delivered in a sexual health clinic run by twin brothers (Kenny and Keith Lucas).

Yoga teacher Eden (Glazer) and dentist Dawn (Buteau) are lifelong best friends, who have celebrated Thanksgiving morning together for the past 27 years. During their traditional visit to the cinema, Dawn goes into labour and Eden offers wise-cracking support to herald the safe arrival of a baby girl named Melanie. On her way home from the birth via New York’s subway system, Eden meets actor Claude (Stephan James), who has just finished shooting a new Martin Scorsese film in which he has two lines of dialogue as a “sexy black waiter”. The pair bond over sushi and getting tested each month at the same sexual health clinic.

“I’m on my period so I can’t get pregnant,” Eden naively informs Claude before they sleep together and have unprotected sex. He subsequently ghosts Eden and when a pregnancy test confirms her nagging intuition, she proceeds with the pregnancy with Dawn and her understanding husband Marty (Hasan Minhaj) as steadfast support. Eden’s wayward journey through trimesters under the care of follicly-challenged obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Morris (John Carroll Lynch) strains the women’s relationship.

Babes sensibly plays to its comedic strengths and mines generous guffaws by focusing on intimate and messy details of pregnancy that were glossed over in films like Knocked Up and Juno. The tonal changes are jarring but Glazer and Buteau’s dynamic pairing is sufficiently slick to oil the grinding cogs of a predictable and crowd-pleasing plot.

– Jo Planter