The Sweet East review – packed with salty goodness

This suc­cu­lent, dou­ble help­ing of cine-scrap­ple lov­ing­ly com­bines the mechan­i­cal­ly-reclaimed morsels of a cul­ture in ide­o­log­i­cal free-fall into a film which offers a panoply of flavours and tex­tures that will be unique to many din­ers. The semi-opaque mir­ror into which a crooked but almost-just-work­able world is reflect­ed is Talia Ryder’s apa­thet­ic high­school-age wan­der­ing waif, Lil­lian, who we join as she breaks away from class trip to America’s seat of pow­er in Wash­ing­ton DC.

A tour-guide states that the White House was built fac­ing west so the com­man­der in chief is best able over­see the sprawl­ing lands under his ward, and so of course we head in the oth­er direc­tion to pass through var­i­ous off-grid sects and fac­tions, meet­ing a rogue’s gallery of impas­sioned chancers en route. The rab­bit hole that Lil­lian tum­bles down is the hid­den door behind a mir­ror in a musty toi­let cubi­cle, and her minia­ture odyssey is catal­ysed by an active shoot­er in the piz­za restau­rant upstairs who sin­cere­ly believes that chil­dren are being raped in the basement.

This is the direc­to­r­i­al debut of cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Sean Price Williams who trans­pos­es his woozi­ly tac­tile ugly/​beautiful aes­thet­ic to a script by Nick Pinker­ton whose salty idio­syn­crasies and ironies offer a cau­tious cel­e­bra­tion of ​“X taught me it was okay to be weird” types whose rad­i­cal agen­das often mask a more gen­tle, or at least more con­fused, under­side. In fact, The Sweet East takes an admirably mea­sured look at soci­etal frac­ture in the mod­ern age, and its use of arch provo­ca­tion becomes a device to rep­re­sent a high­ly recog­nis­able ver­nac­u­lar of despair, where obscen­i­ty (both ver­bal and cor­po­re­al) is the only lan­guage that cuts through the chaff.

While the film is awash with cinephile ref­er­ences, one appar­ent antecedent is Jean-Luc Godard’s apoc­a­lyp­tic soci­o­log­i­cal sur­vey Week-End from 1969. But where there is scep­ti­cism of a sys­tem that is at risk of being over­loaded by dis­sent, the film also sets out to reclaim the notion of civic pride from the nation­al­ists and the nabobs. It also charts the atten­dant pros and cons of the idea that art, his­to­ry, archi­tec­ture and the learn­ings of bygone cul­ture are often manip­u­lat­ed to, in some cas­es uphold a healthy and inquis­i­tive dia­logue with the past, but in oth­ers to jus­ti­fy all man­ner of heinous acts.

If this all makes the film sound like a cold and unap­proach­able aca­d­e­m­ic tract, then that’s only half true. Lillian’s var­i­ous encoun­ters are, for the most part, laced with humour and warmth: even the non­cha­lant neo-nazi Lawrence, bril­liant­ly played by Simon Rex, is pre­sent­ed with a touch­ing fragili­ty where he spouts cul­ture war invec­tive one sec­ond and stu­dious­ly opines on Poe another.

As she pass­es through an anar­chic film set and is cap­tured by a group of reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists in thrall to EDM, she even­tu­al­ly finds her way back to a com­fort­able nor­mal­cy. And in its most rad­i­cal and mov­ing ges­ture, The Sweet East neglects to con­firm whether our hero­ine has been indeli­bly altered by her jour­ney – as the time­worn clichés of cin­e­ma would have us believe – or whether it, like so much in life now, elic­its lit­tle more than a dis­mis­sive roll of the eyes. Scrapple?

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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