If you want to know the tone of The Sweet East, the new film that just premiered at Cannes, here's a taste. It opens with a man swinging a condom full of semen around. Soon after that, the protagonist, Lillian (Talia Ryder), sings a beautiful original song to herself in a graffiti-filled karaoke bathroom. Then there's a pierced penis, which we see with all its many, many studs. Then there’s Simon Rex playing a white supremacist who loves Edgar Allen Poe. And there’s more to come including Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi, with a British accent, as a pompous actor.
This is all to say cinematographer Sean Price Williams’ solo feature directorial debut is wild. It’s also fascinating, a fairytale-esque journey through America that will inevitably turn some viewers off. Written by the critic Nick Pinkerton, it’s the kind of movie designed to push buttons with a little bit of a “u mad” attitude towards political correctness. It can also be very funny in its outrageousness, even if it ends on a moment that ups the provocation.
We first meet teenager Lillian when she’s on a school trip to D.C. with a bunch of other rowdy high schools. Lillian is uninterested in her cohorts. So when she gets the opportunity to run away from them with a punk (Earl Cave), because a man played by comedian Andy Milonakis enters the venue where they are partying waving around a gun and spewing Pizzagate-type conspiracy theories, she does. She tags along with Cave to Baltimore and, from there, follows his activist collective to New Jersey, with the intention of beating up Nazis. There, she meets Lawrence, a white supremacist college professor played by former MTV VJ and Red Rocket star Simon Rex.
Rex is hilarious and terrifying as this well-spoken man, who thinks he’s better than the trashy Neo-Nazis he socializes with, but is also 100 percent a Neo-Nazi. (He has a swastika bedspread, that’s how much of a Nazi he is.) He keeps his distance from Lillian, but clearly lusts after her, especially once she tells him her name is Annabel, which makes him think of the Poe poem “Annabel Lee,” and he's obsessed with Poe. Rex is so good at playing this quasi-intellectual creep, a complete 180 from his hyper creep in Red Rocket.
Lillian, meanwhile, milks Lawrence's interest for all it’s worth, eventually getting him to take her to New York, where she meets two talkative, extremely exuberant filmmakers played by Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris. They immediately cast her in their period-piece movie, which also stars a hunky young actor played by hunky young actor Jacob Elordi.
And the plot goes on like that. Lillian keeps bouncing from place to place, her good looks and naivete a blank slate for whatever people want to project onto her. Not that, as played by Ryder, she’s lacking a personality. She’s shrewd enough to glom onto whoever will help her out in the moment, and smart enough to get out when she needs to. She’s sort of sponge-like, absorbing pieces of everyone she meets into her personality, parroting their words when she has use for them.
Best known for her work in the abortion drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Ryder is incredible here, going from eye-rolling disaffected youth to whoever anyone needs her to be. You understand why people are captivated by Lillian, because you're captivated by her. Except Lillian could give less of a shit about anyone but herself.
This makes her a good receptacle for The Sweet East's take on American ideologies. She’s never intimidated or offended, just along for the ride. To enjoy the film, you have to be down for it too. But even if it pisses you off occasionally or makes you uncomfortable—it certainly did me—it's also shocking, riotous, and always entertaining.
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