~ Review ~
A freewheeling road-trip whipping us through vignettes with different companions, The Sweet East is a bit all over the place, a bit thorny and doesn't come together in a satisfying way.
After a brief, presumably post-coital scene, Lillian is rejected by her lover - a fellow student on her college trip to Washington DC. The students are caught in an armed holdup and Lillian escapes with an antifascist punk. From him, she drifts to a polite, older man - a white supremacist who takes her in as a guest as his home. She then runs into two black filmmakers, (in unironic seventies fashion) who recruit her and whisk her away. Finally, she hides out at a small Islamist training camp.
It is an interesting and distinctive sequence of people and places. The film is presented in a boxy ratio on grainy footage. It drapes a dreamy, out-of-time veil over this unusual journey of mumblecore Fear & Loathing. Although some clumsy symbolism suggests this is an Alice in Wonderland story, Lillian is not ferried though these encounters without agency. She manipulates the characters she meets with tactical lies and plagiarised stories.
She remains however, a surrogate for our journey through the contemporary USA. It is, as one of the filmmakers puts it, "A world made and unmade by men." We are treated to a succession of men (as well as this particular female filmmaker) who love the sound of their own voice. The Sweet East lampoons these characters, unreliable narrators of their country all. The Islamist training camp feels like a bit of an odd choice, not rampantly offensive but neither properly situated in this story about the United States.
Talia Ryder gives Lillian a heady mix of naivety and cunning that makes her feel worth following, but the character's contributions to narrative and dialogue are somewhat lacking. When the white supremacist describes her as "reductive," we might feel inclined to agree, especially considering Lillian's repeated and unexplained use of the word "retarded".
When he accuses, "Everything's a joke to you," it seems pertinent too, to the film as a whole. It is keen to mock. The jokes that tend to land are throwaway and absurdist, such as the Mein Kampf filled with sweets or the apparent use of a (non-diegetic) air machine to blow Lillian's hair. There's some kind of prosthetic alien (shown in the trailer) who sniffs coke with an elephant's trunk, but appears and disappears within a short montage. These kinds of jokes and stylistic splashes are unfortunately not bricks on which a substantial satire of the US can be built, no matter how attractively surreal it tries to be.