ScreenAnarchy Retro: SWEET SUBSTITUTE Review

Kurt Halfyard, Contributing Writer; Toronto, Canada (@triflic)

August 26 2011, 5:20 PM

[In light of his 'secret handshake' anonymity in Canadian film-circles, and a brief encounter at Fantasia this year with yours truly, you will see a few of these ScreenAnarchy Retro reviews focusing on the cinema of underground/indie filmmaker Larry Kent: the godfather of Indie Canadian cinema whose filmography spans well over 40 years. For more background check out Michael Guillen's conversation/interview with Kent. One can pretend that if ScreenAnarchy had been in existence from the origins of cinema, rather than merely the early 21st century, that we would have been covering Kent and many of his Cinepix brethren during the 1960s and 1970s.]

Continuing with the style and themes of his first film, The Bitter Ash, but significantly stepping up the technical aspects, Larry Kent's second film, Sweet Substitute (aka Caressed) echoes its title in it tone, at least for someone looking back on it half a century later. Following the anxieties and not-quite-thought-out-desires of several students about to graduate high-school in Vancouver around the time of the Beatles and the birth control pill, the film has a nostalgic but realistic quality (absent from such wishier-washier yet glossier fare along the lines of American Graffiti) and carries a Canadian pragmatic-innocence for much of its unspooling before the hammer drops. The ending is an unflinchingly honest, bitter little pill, and a challenge to audiences then and now, that nonetheless feels about right. Having watched the bulk of the Kent's 1960s output, this is certainly a recurring narrative theme that jumps out.

All Tom and Bill need is a car and a couple of loose women in their immediate future, or so they think. When given the chance with a prostitute from their more well-to-do (he has a car) fellow student, they are all bravado and little follow through. Right on the cusp of being kids and adults they know that the future is a vague, undefined time, but hormones are right here and right now. Tom is torn between listening to his brains and his genitals as the end of high-school approaches. He has a scholarship nearly in hand, but is itching to lose his virginity in one manner or another. He has an eye for buxom Elaine, a sharp dresser if a little vacant upstairs which fails to let him notice the stunning (to these eyes) Kathy, his study partner, and purveyor of good coffee and casual banter. Sweet Substitute plays out Tom's cluelessness (or his reaction to peer pressure) with the lead character more a passive observer than active participant. Perhaps this a flaw in some regards; a failing of young men that Kent grasps onto. When Tom does make a stand in the final moments - one that was rigorously at odds with the expectations of this viewer, particularly in light of the era of budding flower-children and counter-cultures, it feels like the karmic wheel should come around in an epilogue. Perhaps the emasculation of the lead in High (played by Lanny Beckman who as Bill here is the architect of the Sweet Substitutes climax) is a revenge of sorts by the filmmaker. As ugly as the re-evaluation of Tom might be in light of his choices and choice of friends, the film captures a certain kind of moral failure (at the end of an era of moral certitude) in stark black and white. And life goes on.

[Up Next: The Hamster Cage -- but after a short hiatus for TIFF11]