Sweetness

Bluesky

It’s easy to forget, as an adult, how frustrating it is to be a teenager – to experience the same desires as an adult, on lots of different levels, but to have things constantly put on hold, to be restrained and left with very little control over one’s life. Teenage girls, in particular, are widely mocked by the rest of society, especially when it comes to their sexual and romantic feelings, despite the fact that they are frequently treated as sexual objects by men of all ages. When they objectify people themselves – such as pop stars – they’re held to an absurd double standard. Of course most of them don’t expect that they will ever have relationships with those stars, but fantasies can be a healthy way of dealing with all that stress. At least as long as they stay at arm’s length.

Rylee (Kate Hallett) has an understandable need for escapism. Alongside the usual issues, she lost her mother a few years ago, and there’s no-one she feels comfortable talking to about her complicated feelings. Her dad (Justin Chatwin) clearly loves her and tries hard to fill the void, but he’s still not fully over it himself, plus he has his job as a police officer and new partner Marnie (Amanda Brugel) to keep him busy. Marnie suggests ridiculous things like going to a gig together to have fun, as if a teenager would think it was cool to be seen with someone her age. At least there’s Sid (Aya Furukawa), a friend who has stuck it out in spite of everything, and who shares Rylee’s passion for singer/songwriter Payton (Herman Tømmeraas), whose picture is plastered all over Rylee’s bedroom wall.

It’s well known that Payton has had problems of his own. To Rylee, this makes his lyrics feel all the more intimate and meaningful. The story is that he’s now over the drug addiction; his clean-cut image has been restored. This is what she wants to believe when she goes to see him play, part of a horde of girls screaming out their emotion. Unfortunately, it’s not the reality. When a missed ride and an accident unexpectedly bring the two together, they both try their best to act like respectful, compassionate, functional human beings, but he can’t hide how broken he is for long, and for her part, she feels compelled to save him. As she tells Sid, “We can make a difference here, to something that actually matters.”

If one knows nothing about addicts or why various social rules are in place, it’s not an unreasonable notion. She doesn’t plan to take sexual advantage of him. She wants to give something to him as she feels he has given something to her. She’s full of love and that’s clearly what he’s lacking. As the situation spirals out of control, she tries, at each stage, to be calm and practical and do the best she can. It becomes increasingly heartbreaking to watch. Meanwhile, as his manager (Steven Ogg) makes discreet enquiries into his absence, it emerges that this isn’t the first time he’s disappeared. A cover story is organised. Nobody is coming to save him from his would-be saviour.

Inevitably, Sweetness has been compared to Misery, but it’s a much better film. Rylee isn’t a troubled recluse. Despite the problems she’s had, she’s really very ordinary. Her efforts to learn to flirt by copying what she sees on TikTok make her haplessness and vulnerability uncomfortably clear. At the concert, she’s among the youngest-looking of the fans, not so much in her face but in the unsophisticated way that she presents herself. The sound design is beautifully handled so that it’s easy to understand how personal the experience feels for her. A forest of hands stretches out from the crowd, all reaching for a young man who has been dressed up like a piece of meat. It’s a role that he’s unhappy in, and the tale he has to tell is ordinary too, for someone in his circumstances. They both feel like pieces in a much larger game. It’s not surprising if they struggle to remember one another’s humanity when they’re both routinely treated like commodities.

So carefully balanced is this that the film could almost have emerged as a romcom, and it’s that possibility, that clash between the absurdity that cinema has taught us to expect and the bitterness of real life, that makes it so effective. One of the strongest films presented at this year’s South by Southwest, it’s insightful and compelling and a necessary response to much that has gone before.