The clumsy, drunken lunge and uninvited cheek-kiss that precipitates the action in wildly uneven French-Canadian comedy “Babysitter” is oddly appropriate for a film that can also feel like the victim of misguided, intrusive, if hardly malevolent exuberance.
Far less coherent than her more focused and confident debut “A Brother’s Love,” Monia Chokri’s second feature is basically a series of sketches, some of which comment on ingrained, unconscious misogyny, while others lampoon the culture of hypersensitivity around less severe examples of unexamined sexism, such as that forced kiss.
This makes it apt, too, that “Babysitter” has such a sugary aesthetic: It often looks like the cake it wants both to have and to eat.An awkward prologue bears the scars of restrictive pandemic shooting.
Through headachey close-ups, whip-pans and crash zooms, Chokri tries to fabricate the atmosphere of a crowded arena where an Mma title fight is underway.
The pans
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