BFI London Film Festival 2023: The Sweet East

For want of a better word, there’s something really nice in the opening act of The Sweet East. It starts with some old home-videoesque grainy footage of a young couple behaving exactly like a young couple. They’re a bit awkward around one another, but they’re full of dreams and aspirations that they aren’t shy about. There’s an air of hope which only grows when we follow them, along with their classmates, to the White House on a school trip. We learn about how it deliberately faces west to look towards the rest of the country from its eastern position, and it’s all very promising. It feels as if we’re about to get a modern bildungsroman about the forgotten neighbourhoods that lie east of the White House. Brilliant.

Then it all falls apart in spectacular fashion.

The cinematography, the locations, the actors, everything from a technical point of view is very good. What isn’t, is its bizarre narrative. Lillian (Talia Ryder) is the protagonist at the centre of it all, but she just isn’t at all adept at protagonising. She just aimlessly wanders from one absurd event to another, without any influence as to what’s going on.

The problem as well, is that these absurd events aren’t given the gravity that they warrant at all. There’s neo-Nazis, a religious cult, and themes of abuse in Hollywood, but Lillian is just present for it all. She never seems all that bothered by what she’s being drawn into, and it’s hard to gauge how we should feel about it because of that. There are sequences during the neo-Nazi segment that feel as if she’s just happy enough to be there because she shows such little interest in it that the assumption becomes that it must be a familiar environment. The problem doesn’t seem to be Talia Ryder’s interpretation of the material, though. It’s just written in such a flimsy manner that it’s impossible to latch onto anything. Even with such extreme contextual elements.

It does feel as if it’s trying to achieve something akin to an anti-Forrest Gump effect. Where Forrest Gump told the story of the USA by hanging all of its history on one otherwise unremarkable man, The Sweet East seems to be attempting to show its country’s present and future flaws by putting Lillian through them all. That’s a brilliant concept, but its execution doesn’t really land. It only ever leads to melancholy, and while that’s an interesting piece of commentary, it’s an incomplete conclusion without any opposition.

★★☆☆☆