Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Sean Price Williams
Starring: Talia Ryder, Earl Cave, Simon Rex, Ayo Edebiri, Jeremy O. Harris, Jacob Elordi, Rish Shah
The Sweet East comes loaded with American indie cinema
cred. It's the directorial debut of cinematographer
Sean Price Williams, whose distinctively granular images have
graced the films of the Safdies, Alex Ross Perry and Abel Ferrara. It's
produced by the aforementioned Perry. It's the first screenplay of
firebrand film critic Nick Pinkerton. Its lead is
Talia Ryder of
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
fame. You won't be surprised to learn that it's shot on 16mm film.
There's a popular online meme involving a photograph of a young man
talking in the ear of a clearly disinterested young woman.
The Sweet East is something of a feature length adaptation
of said meme, with Ryder in the position of the bored young woman. She
plays Lillian, a high schooler whose class heads off to Washington D.C.
for a school trip. While she and her classmates are dining at a
pizzeria, a lunatic enters the establishment with a machine gun,
demanding the proprietors admit to running a child sex ring in the
basement, ala the infamous "pizzagate" conspiracy theory. The twist here
is that it's hinted that there really is a child sex ring in the
basement. As Lillian is guided to safety by a young punk, Caleb (Earl Cave), through a labyrinthine series of subterranean corridors littered
with children's toys, he remarks how it seemed bigger when he was a
kid.
This is an early indication that The Sweet East isn't
interested in pandering to any acceptable liberal sensibilities. The
right wing conspiracy around child sex trafficking is something we're
supposed to frown at, so the idea of constructing a joke out of the
inconceivable notion that there might be a kernel of truth in the theory
is likely to ruffle many an ideologically insecure feather. The worst
comedy punches down, but a lot of terrible comedy punches up because
it's an equally easy target. The best comedy comes from those who aren't
afraid to punch sideways, who can mock their own circles.
The following scenes take potshots at left-wing disrupters via Caleb,
who calls himself an "artivist" and babbles on incessantly about how he
incorporates his art into his activism. Mostly it seems he wants to get
into Lillian's pants, but when she's exposed to his pierced penis she's
having none of it.
The Sweet East proves itself an equal opportunities
offender when Lillian skips out on her new lefty friends and wanders
into a Neo-Nazi gathering. There she meets Lawrence (Simon Rex),
a Jordan Peterson-esque professor who bemoans how today's white
supremacist movement fails to attract the best class of white people.
Lawrence clearly wants to get into Lillian's pants too, but his
conservative ideology forbids him from acting on such desires. It's in
this section that The Sweet East really leans into the
aforementioned meme, as Lawrence takes Lillian into his home and spends
weeks lecturing her on history as she stares vacantly into space.
Williams' film is structured somewhat like those many 1970s softcore
sexploitation movies in which an attractive young heroine skips from one
misadventure to another, getting laid several times along the way. The
joke here is that Lillian never gets laid, even when she clearly wants
to. Everyone she meets – whether it's left wing or right wing whackos,
pretentious filmmakers or Islamist terrorists – spends their time in her
presence lecturing her with reams of pseudo intellectual nonsense in a
condescending attempt to seduce her with their perceived intellectual
superiority. The film posits that people have stopped fucking today
because they're so committed to art and activism that all the blood goes
to their heads rather than their genitals. It's a misanthropic view that
could easily be dismissed as the product of an edgelord were there not a
grain of truth to it all.
Richard Hell famously sang of boomers as "The Blank Generation."
Through the listless Lillian, who rolls her eyes at every artistic or
political endeavour she encounters,
The Sweet East suggests it's a label that might better
suit Gen Z. But with so much white noise in today's cultural discourse,
who can blame any young woman who decides to empty their head and
retreat from the pseudo sincerity of those who use art and activism for
the age old purpose of getting into her pants? In a late scene Lillian
is compelled to break out in a laughing fit as yet another man starts
rambling on. She's heard it all before. By the age of 17, most girls
have.
