Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.
There’s a tendency among queer audiences — a tendency I’ve been plenty guilty of myself — to critique a movie for not being what we, the individual, wanted to see rather than what the filmmakers wanted to make. Sometimes the critique is that the queer experience on-screen is not relatable enough for us. Other times the critique is the film is not pushing Queer Cinema™ forward with enough boldness and originality. But these are reasons someone might not love a movie or might not connect with a movie — they aren’t critiques of the film itself.
Melanie Oates’ Sweet Angel Baby is not a film that was made for me. While I grew up in a gossipy conservative suburb with plenty of homophobia, I had the tenacity — and, maybe more importantly, the privilege — to leave when I turned 18. I’ve lived in major cities since then and have curated a homonormative life. Part of this life has involved watching hundreds of lesbian movies, many that take place in suburbs and small towns and portray queer adults who were not able to — or did not want to — leave the place where they grew up.
It’s unclear which category Eliza (Michaela Kurimsky), the protagonist of Oates’ film, falls into. She’s still living in her small fishing town in Newfoundland, but, in many ways, she seems to like it. She enjoys being surrounded by nature; she’s close with the various members of her town; her involvement in the local church even feels like it comes from a genuine place of faith rather than guilt. What’s challenging for Eliza is she’s not able to move through this life as her full self. There is a bifurcation between this Eliza and the Eliza who is secret friends with benefits with her coworker Toni (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) or the Eliza who runs an anonymous Instagram account where she posts provocative photos of herself swinging an ax in the woods or smeared with jam or in front of a candlelit moose head.
These lives begin to meld after she gives into the advances of (married) golden boy Sean (Peter Mooney) who risks exposing her secrets while providing another. The dynamic between Eliza and Sean will feel familiar to any closeted queer woman who allowed herself to be taken advantage of by a bad man in her quest for validation.
Sweet Angel Baby is a melancholy film. It carries a constant sense of dread discordant with its lush exteriors. When the inevitable occurs, Eliza experiences homophobia, biphobia, and sexual shaming that is in no way exaggerated or exploitative but is still painful to witness.
For many, the misery of the film will be off-putting — even though it has enough balance and positivity to never feel maudlin — but I’m challenging myself to not write it off. Can something be dismissed as a trope when it’s still happening all over the world? Isn’t there still a place for coming out stories and stories of small-town homophobia as long as it doesn’t make up the whole of queer cinema?
It helps that Kurimsky and Tailfeathers both give lovely, powerful performances as two queer women — one desperate not to be an outcast, the other long-accepting the label. Their chemistry holds a pointed distance, the desire present but repressed and restrained. It sometimes makes the film frustrating which is revealed to be the point.
I’m glad we have lesbian cinema that goes beyond this narrative of homophobia and shame. But as long as homophobia and shame are present in our world, there will be a place for movies like Sweet Angel Baby.
