Credit: Courtesy of Utopia
Entertainment
The Sweet East: a fantastical spin on the coming of age tale for a modern world
By Meg Walters
11 months ago
3 min read
New England becomes a wacky, weird, wonderful fantasmagoria in the new Talia Ryder film.
Part coming-of-age indie, part sweeping fantasy, The Sweet East is a dizzyingly fantastical trip down a very modern rabbit hole into the curiouser and curiouser world of contemporary America. Weird and wonderful, artful and ugly, this debut feature from cinematographer Sean Price Williams offers a damning verdict on a splintered America, as seen through the eyes of a girl who never really seems to know quite what she’s looking at.
The Sweet East, which stars Talia Ryder (Do Revenge), Ayo Edebiri (The Bear, Bottoms) and Jacob Elordi (Saltburn, Priscilla) is a deft play on the classic literary trope known as the Hero’s Journey. The film adheres to the recognisable structure: a daring protagonist (usually a knight of some description) embarks on a quest, leaving behind all that is familiar in favour of lands unknown, meeting an array of larger-than-life characters who help or hinder them along the way. It’s a framework that has been updated, tweaked and feminised before: Alice In Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, even David Bowie’s cult classic Labyrinth.
Credit: Courtesy of Utopia
The Sweet East follows in this tradition. We follow our heroine, Lillian, a listless, quiet high school senior from North Carolina, as she sets off on a journey across the northeastern coast of America, meeting an array of increasingly strange oddballs from niche subcultures along the way. During a school trip to Washington, she falls into the company of a punk Marxist group, before meeting a creepy neo-Nazia academic, a couple of pretentious indie filmmakers and a lonely Vermont farmer. Like any good coming-of-age drama, The Sweet East lets Lillian try on new personas, learning from and mimicking the people she encounters. She assumes the role of violent leftist vigilante with ease; she morphs into a ribbon-bedecked Lolita, playacting naive sexuality with the frustrated neo-Nazi, Lawrence; she transforms next into a budding starlet who parties the night away, flirts with her famous co-star and giddily graces the covers of tabloids; she willingly assumes the role of beautiful prisoner in the Vermont farmhouse.
The Sweet East is a dizzyingly fantastical trip
As the ever-transformational Lillian, Ryder presents us with a girl who is listless and uninformed. Her opinions about what she sees and hears are kept quiet – that is, if she has any opinions at all. Her rare contributions consist of mocking and sardonic smiles. Ryder’s performance is subtly, quietly drawn, although the character herself is frustratingly blurred at the edges.
The characters she meets along the way are all superbly, precisely crafted caricatures. Edebiri brings her signature wit and humour to the role of Molly, an affected film director. The perfectly cast Elordi oozes charm and charisma as Ian, “the nation’s crush” and a rather dim actor. Rish Shah (who previously appeared alongside Ryder in Do Revenge) gives an affecting, unsettling turn as the soulful, proprietary Mohammad.
In a classic Hero’s Journey tale, the hero always succeeds: against all odds, they vanquish their enemies, they achieve their goal, they reach their destination. But in the fractured, straining modern America of The Sweet East, this tidy conclusion doesn’t quite work – instead, our heroine has, it seems, no clear goal, no set destination. And so, she floats into an ever weirder and wackier world that eventually loses its grip on reality altogether – Vermont is transformed into a landscape painting; Lillian sees a cartoon image through the barrel of a gun; she winds up at a fantastical monk’s castle on a windswept cliff.
She floats into an ever weirder and wackier world
Credit: Courtesy of Utopia
Lillian is a modern-day Alice. But instead of rising above the madness and clamouring back out of the rabbit hole, you get the sense that the madness she has seen has seeped into her very core. The Sweet East is a beautiful trip of a film that captures the sheer oddness of growing up as a woman today in a world of bizarre political leanings and inexplicable obsessions – a world where people are increasingly cocooned in their own little worlds. In Williams’ portrait of America, it is a society on the verge of mental breakdown – and it seems that, having grown up in this chaos, his heroine can only dive in headfirst.
The Sweet East comes to cinemas on 29 March 2024.
Images courtesy of Utopia
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