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?

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