The Sweet East is certainly polarising. Watching the directorial debut of cinematographer and Safdie brothers collaborator Sean Price Williams is a little like getting stuck in a train carriage with a teenager blasting music through the tinny speaker of their mobile phone. On the one hand it’s enraging and you would do pretty much anything to make it stop. And yet there’s a grudging admiration for the insouciant swagger, for the no fucks given attitude and the glassy layer of self-absorption. It takes a certain elan to be this unapologetically obnoxious, so kudos for that, I guess.
A digressive, episodic journey of self-discovery, the film follows Lillian (star-in-the-making Talia Ryder), a high school student from South Carolina who gets separated from her classmates during a trip to Washington DC. Lillian swaps names and identities the way other people change nail polish colours; she latches on to a group of activists, including the smoky-eyed, extravagantly pierced Caleb (Earl Cave); then middle-aged white supremacist Lawrence (Simon Rex), then Molly (Ayo Edebiri), an excruciatingly pretentious film-maker who casts Lillian opposite heartthrob Ian (Jacob Elordi) in her indie film production.
Williams’s work as a cinematographer includes the Safdies’ Heaven Knows What and Good Time, and Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell – all films that share the rattled, chaotic energy that informs the snotty, satirical tone and flick-book attention span of The Sweet East. But for all its to-the-moment social commentary, the film has roots in the anarchistic, surrealist 60s: Lillian could be a direct descendant of minxy troublemakers Marie I and Marie II from Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, reimagined for the TikTok generation.
