Michaela Kurimsky plays Eliza, a character with some fraught secrets in Sweet Angel Baby.Supplied
Sweet Angel Baby
Written and directed by Melanie Oates
Starring Michaela Kurimsky, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Peter Mooney
Classification N/A; 95 minutes
Opens in select theatres Aug. 18
Rumours travel through the mouths of small-town Newfoundlanders – crude, livid and quick – in Melanie Oates’s sophomore feature, a lukewarm coastal drama about a young woman condemned for her risqué online persona.
Sweet Angel Baby, Oates’s contemporary Canadian remix of The Scarlet Letter lets the audience in on the conflict early enough that each subtle action thereafter – a glance, a whisper, the rustling of leaves – lands like a jump scare. Eventually, the mounting paranoia and latent threat of exposure has real-world consequences.
Eliza (Michaela Kurimsky) lives in a bucolic fishing village with little to do beyond labouring or churchgoing (worsened by the early reveal that the local church property has been sold). It’s a familiar setting, whether or not you’ve lived there: The locals are tight-knit to a fault, and privacy, like gossip, is a hot commodity.
Clearly beloved within the community, Eliza partakes in bingo-night fundraisers and crammed house parties, where family friends chide her for never having a boyfriend. “If I had that face and that body, I’d be using it!” says one relative, in a too on-the-nose prediction of how Eliza is in fact “using” her body. Within the first five minutes of the film, she poses in the woods before a tripod, wearing a bikini and a ski mask while hacking a loaf of bread with an axe – a set-up performed casually and expertly, clearly a ritual.
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Eliza has two secrets, both concerning her private desires and self-expression. One, she is queer and quietly seeing Toni (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers), an out lesbian ostracized by the locals, with whom she works at a diner. Two, she has an anonymous Instagram account, “lil_wildling,” where she posts artfully racy photos to an audience of 318,000 followers.
In her hundreds of posts, Eliza has established an aesthetic of smutty outdoorsy imagery, where she is splayed out in various secluded areas. In a field, she spreads blueberry jam on her chest; in a neighbour’s shed, she crouches nude behind a sizable pair of antlers. Comments on her posts range from horny emojis to affirming statements and demands. Integrating her body into the environment, Eliza becomes a part of something larger than herself or her community: an anonymous, one-woman ecosystem.
The arrival of a married man, intimately familiar with lil_wildling’s postings, ultimately exposes Eliza’s digital double life to the community, including her mother, grandmother and lover. However, this first half of the film, an anxious wind-up toward public outrage, is far more compelling than its aftermath, a slut-shaming blowout that flattens into a tidy, unrealistic conclusion.
Cinematographer Christopher Mably illustrates the town’s skittish temperament through its overcast setting and harshly lit interiors, reinforcing the insularity of its locals. Like the internet, everything is at once vast and depleted. Waves crash angrily onto the shoreline; a flood of comments, both positive and negative, hits Eliza’s notifications.
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It’s a curious choice to make Eliza’s content Instagram-safe, absent of explicit nudity or pornography. It evades the verbiage of “sex work” and seems to fall safely under a banner of edgy “expression.” Her secret habit plays out like a means of control or careful self-curation in a locale that rejects her existence. In reckoning with her queerness and online persona, these two so-called transgressions are mirrored, both marred by accusations of deviant, hypersexual behaviour.
Kurimsky and Tailfeathers play well off of each other, conveying a history of secretive rendezvous and real affection, but their relationship becomes secondary to the nightmare of coercion, judgment and expulsion Eliza faces. It is unfortunate that queer acceptance only manifests here after a character is bulldozed by local rhetoric; however true to life, this tugs at the broader question of how obvious certain indignities have to be for audiences to empathize. Is Eliza’s self-acceptance earned in our eyes because we watched her be cast out first?
Within a landscape of films about queer people desperate to escape their hometowns, Sweet Angel Baby gets at the paradox of loving and loathing where you come from while staying there on your own terms. But as a project about identity formation, the film feels inconclusive about its protagonist, whose online audience offers a dormant but sustained sense of validation, running parallel to her coming out. These complications, or contradictions, are genuinely intriguing, but are glossed over in favour of a safer, cut and dried narrative.
