52 Films by Women Vol 6. 11. SWEETHEART (Director: Marley Morrison)
Contains spoilers
Never underestimate
the impact of a coming-of-age film for those who had never seen themselves on
screen before. Sweetheart, the debut feature of the now 35-year-old British
writer-director Marley Morrison, captures frighteningly well that feeling of
being a teenager, resenting your family, but not being sure of what to do next.
‘I used to love all
this,’ muses AJ (Nell Barlow) in voiceover, looking at the detritus of a 9th
birthday party enjoyed by her younger sister, Dayna (Tabitha Byron). ‘It was my
whole world.’ The line is spoken at a critical point. AJ, formally known as
April Jane, has fallen for Isla (Ella-Rae Smith), a lifeguard at the Dorset
caravan park, Freshwater, where AJ and her family are vacationing. Only AJ’s
feelings for Isla have reached a critical mass. AJ saw Isla stepping into a
caravan with fellow lifeguard Nathan (Steffann Cennydd) and imagined the worst.
This after the two young women had kissed.
AJ’s holiday reading
is the poetry anthology, ‘The Dizziness of Freedom’. She hides her self-chopped
hair under a denim-bucket hat and covers her eyes with huge sunglasses. When we
see her late in the film wearing a safari-style shirt, it appears AJ has gone
full Hunter S Thompson. However, she has no aspirations of being a gonzo
writer. Instead she wants to volunteer to knit jumpers for elephants in
Indonesia. ‘I thought elephants lived in the desert,’ says Steve (Samuel
Anderson), AJ’s laidback and generally placating brother-in-law, married to
AJ’s heavily pregnant older sister, Lucy (Sophia Di Martino). ‘Yes,’ agrees AJ,
’but they get terribly cold at night’. This ‘jumpers for elephants’ (as opposed
to ‘for goalposts’) fad is only AJ’s latest enthusiasm – at least according to
her mother, Tina (Jo Hartley). Responding to AJ’s announcement that she wants
to leave school, aged seventeen, having not completed her A levels, Tina
screams at her, ‘you don’t know what you want’. AJ wanted to be left at home
and not join her siblings for the trip to Dorset, only mum wouldn’t allow it,
worrying that unsupervised she would end up taking drugs. AJ would rather hang
out with her dad, whom Tina had thrown out of the house and who isn’t joining
them for the holiday. Dad, however, doesn’t answer the phone. Tina imagines him
getting drunk somewhere.
The opening scene
put me in mind of Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film, Lady Bird. Like
Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson, AJ has re-branded herself. Like Lady Bird, Sweetheart also opens with a car journey, Tina pointing
out cows to AJ and Dayna. AJ doesn’t do anything as drastic as Lady Bird, but
she is just as argumentative and misunderstood. When they arrive at Freshwater, they meet Lucy
and Steve. AJ is ordered to carry the luggage.
The caravan park is
not AJ’s idea of fun. She doesn’t swim. The evening entertainment, which
includes a singer and a magician, doesn’t have any appeal for her. However, she
is struck by a photograph of Isla on the employee board. When Isla and AJ meet,
there is instant chemistry. Isla invites AJ to a party. AJ persuades her mother
to let her have some time away from the family, during a particularly cheesy,
yet slick magic show (William Andrews, as Phil the magician, has his routine
down pat).
One of the
lifeguards believes that the Earth is flat – he’s a sceptic who reminds us of the
all-too-numerous climate change and Covid-19 deniers; the film was shot in
2019, pre-Covid. AJ describes how you can prove the world is round. The horizon
is lower. Her explanation is so authoritative that it silences the room. She is
asked how she knows this stuff. ‘I conducted experiments while climbing a tree.
I got this mark falling from one,’ she adds, pointing to her head. AJ explains
to the group that she is eighteen and not going to university, giving them the
elephant jumpers in Indonesia spiel. ‘Is that like a gap year?’ someone asks.
AJ and Isla almost kiss in the bathroom. Only someone is
desperate for a wee. (Talk about killing the mood.) When Isla disappears with
Nathan, AJ responds by doing shots with a boy. She ends up horribly drunk and,
after staggering back to the caravan, vomiting on her sister’s shoes.
One of the most welcome aspects of the film is that the
family – except for maybe AJ’s younger sister – is reconciled to her sexuality.
They know she is queer. Sweetheart
isn’t a coming-out film – that is happily so last century – rather a film about
a young woman struggling to read the sexuality of others. Isla passes for
heterosexual and is accepted in her peer group as such. However, AJ later
discovers that Isla has a reputation for, to be put it obliquely, temporary
enthusiasms.
AJ really gets to know Isla when she is invited to the beach
on Isla’s day off. ‘So this is what we’re doing – sunbathing,’ remarks AJ. AJ
explains how she lied about being eighteen. She’s seventeen and still at
school. In the course of her explanation, AJ catches the sun. They strip to
their swimsuits – Isla thinks AJ wears too many clothes - and stand in a
rockpool, an area on the otherwise stony beach where sea water was collected. They
end up in Isla’s caravan and kiss. AJ withdraws suddenly and runs. When AJ and
Isla speak again, they row, AJ making a disparaging comment about Isla working
in a caravan park.
AJ upsets her mother further by leaving Dayna on her own in
the pool while she looks for Isla. She tells Dayna that she is going to the
toilet. When AJ returns, Isla is gone. After a frantic search, she returns to
the caravan. Dayna is there listening to music through her headphones. Tina is
furious. AJ had one job to do. AJ’s surliness takes over. She talks to, then
kisses Elvis (Spike Fearn) another of the resort’s lifeguards. Only she stops
kissing him and flees.
The film builds to disco night when AJ is almost happy,
rejecting Nathan’s offer to buy her a drink. ‘Grease is set in the 1950s,’ she
says referring to Nathan’s attire during the 1960s ‘Dirty Dancing’ night.
Nathan doesn’t understand the comment. Seeing Isla with Nathan, AJ leaves. Lucy
follows her. She then experiences a stomach pain. ‘If you make me give birth in
a car park,’ she explains whilst in discomfort. However, there is no mad rush
to the hospital; we’ve seen that film before. Instead AJ and Isla speak - and
then some. Meanwhile, Tina, sitting at the disco waiting for AJ, gets talking
to magician Phil. Gentle flirtation doesn’t lead anywhere.
Sweetheart doesn’t do anything particularly
new with the teenage romance at a holiday park genre – you know, ‘the summer
when everything changed’. But what it does is portray it with honesty, warmth
and humour. Flat earth discussion and AJ’s Hunter S Thompson attire aside,
there are no flair moments. However, each character is given a grace note. For
all her moaning, Lucy tells AJ that she was seventeen once. Steve can see that
AJ fancies Isla. Dayna is very talkative on her ninth birthday and Jo reminds
her daughter that she is struggling to keep the family together and loves AJ.
AJ’s caravan park romance is bitter-sweet but also old-fashioned. There is no
mention of keeping in touch through social media, rather meeting again next
summer – when AJ really would be eighteen. Her tentativeness – and Nell
Barlow’s central performance – grounds the film. The threatened one-night stand
between Tina and Phil is gently understated. It ends with Tina taking off her
shoes and walking back to the caravan. The soundtrack is full of middle of the
road songs with strumming guitars and heavy drums – aural wallpaper (which
ought to be the name of a band but strangely isn’t). Morrison’s route to making
the film is fascinating, abandoning a more political film that she previously
received funding for, and, in her youth, previously playing for Watford Ladies
and Newcastle Ladies football clubs, until a back injury curtailed her career.
‘My father wanted a boy,’ AJ recalls at one point. ‘I think about that a lot.’
Unquestionably, from its reception at film festivals – it won the audience
award at the 2021 Glasgow Film Festival – Sweetheart resonates
and will win you over.
Reviewed at Ashford Picturehouse, Kent (Screen Six),
Sunday 19 September 2021, 11:00 members preview screening
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