Tribeca: “Baby Tooth” Asks How Absurd is Too Absurd?
Who among us has not been presented with a question at a crossroads? Should I move here or there? Pursue this career or that one? Are you here for the boat or the tooth? That last question is at the strange heart of Olivia Accardo’s Baby Tooth. The short film will play at Tribeca as part of the Shorts: Pick N Mix program alongside six other films. Baby Tooth is a little oddball flick that’s as much about remembering loved ones as it is about absurdly hard-headed people who choose to live in their own realities.
A young woman (Dakota Bouher) dressed in a hot pink jumpsuit sits on a beach chair in a dusty field. She wears sunglasses and has a leopard print scarf tied around her head. Hanging from her mouth is a string. Behind her stands a boat from the 1970s, her grandfather’s boat. A man (Keith Roy Chrismon) approaches and she asks the essential question: “Are you here for the boat or the tooth?”
Courtesy of Tribeca
Baby Tooth is a wonderfully compact exercise in chaotic absurdity. With a runtime on the shorter end, it’s hard to discuss the film without ruining the funny, quirky little paths Baby Tooth wanders down. The film is so stylistically its own with lush, saturated green grass and strikingly hot pink jumpsuit. Both stand in firm contrast to the man, his plain button-down, and his dirty pick up. They are two sides of the same self-righteous coin. They each believe they are the main character of the story, firmly grounded in their rights. If the only two people in the conversation think the other is insane, are they both insane? Or is no one insane? Baby Tooth would like to find out.
There’s a lot to love in Baby Tooth. From the strange, whole-bodied performances by Bouher and Chrismon, the glorious color grading, and the on-the-nose sound effects, to the simple perfection of the boat always lingering in the background, Baby Tooth packs quite a punch in its short runtime. It’s like the old saying goes: when life gives you a boat, sometimes you end up with a tooth on a string.
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