At a climactic point in this often wilfully anticlimactic film, a prodigiously bearded man in priestly garb screams the words “WE HAVE SQUANDERED A GREAT INHERITANCE” over and over again as the set of the period drama he is supposed to appear in burns around him. The character is played by the movie’s screenwriter, film critic extraordinaire Nick Pinkerton, but it would be foolish to interpret his words as an expression of authorial intent. Nothing so tedious (nor so Trumpian) as an elegy for America’s faded glory, The Sweet East has its sights set squarely on the pathologies of the country’s present, a blinkered obsession with the supposed greatness of its past being among the most enormous. If this oblivious bit-player has anything in common with the other misfits and nutjobs who populate the film, it’s the fact that he seems locked into his own totally private world, persisting in his role with maniacal stubbornness even while everything else goes up in flames.
Indeed, this delirious trip across the subcultural landscape of the USA is full of individuals and groups who inhabit the same country but have little in the way of common ground, not just figuratively but literally too, in that their paths hardly ever cross. One attempt at confrontation fails pitifully, while another deteriorates into arbitrary violence. What connects them all is the protagonist, Lillian, a teenage girl who drifts away from a dull school trip to Washington and proceeds to make the most of the kindness of various strangers: a self-proclaimed ‘artivist’ with a comprehensively pierced penis, a gentlemanly and sexually stifled Nazi sympathiser, a couple of giddy (read: cokey) independent filmmakers and an enclave of Islamic fundamentalists who spend their nights dancing shirtless around a bonfire to the pulsing rhythms of a techno mixtape called ‘Bismillah Beats’. Through all of this, Lillian herself remains intriguingly illegible; she plays her cards close to her chest, cannily identifying the weaknesses of her benefactors and playing on them until she gets bored, picking up a phrase or a thought from one transitory companion and strategically deploying it in the presence of another.
At times, her apparent blankness put me in mind of classic figures of modern picaresque, like Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum or the Good Soldier Švejk, ‘innocents’ whose seeming naïveté is likely a mask for something more cunning and, at least in Oskar’s case, morally troubling. Still, Lillian’s situation seems slightly more straightforward. Out on her own and surrounded by people of dubious mental composure, she’s just trying to survive and thrive, her irresponsibility as much a function of her youth and a (justified) suspicion of her patrons as it is of any underlying nihilism. Our sense of Lillian’s engaging ambivalences comes partly from Pinkerton’s script, but Talia Ryder deserves the most credit, building her character around a core of listless curiosity from which she departs in sporadic accesses of charm, malevolence, eagerness and sulky self-possession.
Both Pinkerton and director Sean Price Williams (making his debut after an impressive run as the cinematographer on films like Good Time, Wobble Palace and Funny Pages) are confirmed cineastes, and it shows: the film is full of details that seem almost expressly designed to evoke a sense of knowing, they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to delight in all but the most casual moviegoers. A genius feat of puppetry goes into a blink-and-it’s-gone gag involving an indescribably grotesque creature at a barroom party who uses his chubby proboscis to hoover up a fat line of coke, one of a number of low-fi special effects that also include an exploding head, a mini model of a Gothic monastery beset by thunder and lightning, and an unexpected snippet of cel animation glimpsed through a pair of binoculars. The central bulk of the film is divided into five chapters, each of which is announced with a title card in a zine-ish, hand-crafted style. A skewedly sweet ballad, ‘Evening Mirror’, was written specially for the film and plays over its opening credits, sung by Ryder herself. Although these homespun elements have a retro flavour, they ultimately enhance the film without subtracting from its contemporaneity, which just goes to show that there’s a difference between consciously resisting the mores of the present and simply retreating from them into a kitschified vision of the past.
That ethos comes through in other ways as well. Unlike the mediocre work of video art Lillian is subjected to in one scene, which is supposed to replicate the feeling of being on the Internet, much of The Sweet East takes place in a peculiarly offline realm of handwritten letters, printed newspapers and burned CDs, indexing the real, physical world that carries on much in the way it always has while we goggle at our phone screens. The film remains similarly aloof, too, from the standard array of responses that we have come to expect from more or less any artwork that tries to take the temperature of the times. Though it draws inspiration from some recent events numbingly familiar to those of us who exist in the US media’s sphere of influence, it has no particular ‘take’ to dispense. This is a mercy in an age when a crisis of liberal self-confidence has resulted in a spate of moralising, hand-holding offerings in all areas of culture, predicated on the false assumption that no-one is capable of drawing progressive conclusions of their own free will, but only if they’ve been tortured into accepting them by means of the worst kind of preachy sentimentality. Here, by contrast, the viewer is trusted to recognise for themselves that, say, jaundiced neo-Nazi Lawrence is not in fact an exemplary human being, even if his Victorian manner, collection of hand-reared moths and passion for Poe render him intermittently charming in a cracked, pathetic way.
Despite (or, probably, because of) these attempts to dodge the predictable moves of contemporary cultural chatter and to account for some of the less palatable contradictions of human existence, some critics have worried that the film becomes something disturbingly indistinguishable from a piece of alt-right propaganda. That style of criticism usually betrays a pompous overestimation of cinema’s power — nay, its duty — to somehow remedy all of society’s ills, not to mention a condescending view of what audiences can be expected to deal with. The Sweet East is a scuzzily comic exploration of what Philip Roth, in a genuinely reactionary work, once called ‘the indigenous American berserk’. But its creators clearly recognise that films that try to set the world to rights usually fail to do justice to how fucked up it is in the first place. Like Suspiria, whose cool, resourceful protagonist Lillian kind of resembles, the movie ends with a smile, which might be taken as a gesture not of indifference, but of defiant joie de vivre at a time when numbed despair would be a very reasonable response to the general state of things. Much of what is interesting about The Sweet East will be lost on people who are only able to appreciate a film for its so-called ‘message’. But if it absolutely had to have one, it might be something like Werner Schroeter’s observation that ‘life is very precious, even right now’.