Review of the film “Tender East” by Sean Price Williams

In theaters is The Sweet East, the delightful and outrageous directorial debut of cinematographer Sean Price Williams. One of the best American films I’ve seen in a long time Mikhail Trofimenkov, convinced him that “ex-operator of Abel Ferrara” is not a line on the author’s track record, but a diagnosis in the best sense of the word.

The “Alice in Wonderland” matrix, with all its falls into rabbit holes, get-togethers with the Mad Hatters and other “off with her head”, is worn out in world cinema to the point of wear and tear. However, finding itself in the hands of an author who collaborated with one of the most cynical and gentle directors of modern cinema, it surprisingly not only works, but seems fresh and innocent, like the heroine Annabelle-Lillian (Talia Ryder), who emerges surprisingly unbruised from the most incredible plot twists.

Rarely has a film’s synopsis that sets viewers up for the tune of a moronic teen comedy—”A South Carolina high school student gets left behind by a school bus on a field trip to Washington D.C.”—has been so misleading. However, the heroine’s companions really turn out to be model animals from the conventional “American Pie”. Clever Williams only needs to take a camera on the asses of young troglodytes lined up in front of the White House to create a collective portrait of young provincial America. And only Annabelle-Lillian dares to dive into the first of the many rabbit holes that comes her way in order to find herself in another country.

However, she herself is a little not from modern America: most of the madmen she meets on her travels take her for the embodiment of the spirit of Victorian America of the 19th century. And she, changing names, stealing details of other people’s lives and other people’s bags of money, provoking one of the most ridiculous and bloody carnages that the American screen has seen since the days of young Tarantino and Rodriguez, naturally “goes with the flow.” Or, rather, she is being carried over a crazy country by a hurricane similar to the one that once carried away Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

The film could have been called Annabelle in the Land of Scared Idiots, or more accurately, Scared Paranoids. The United States appears as a collection of crazy communities, each of which is mortally afraid of antagonists, suspects them of plotting against humanity, and itself plans dizzying conspiracies.

The first of the doors that the heroine opens turns out to be a secret passage in the toilet of a punk club. A body-positive defender of traditional values ​​burst into the club and, shooting at the ceiling, demands that the innocent – and, God knows, maybe guilty – owner let him into the dungeon, where he rapes and kills babies. So the girl, together with the punk Caleb, pierced in all possible and impossible places, has to escape from the bar through underground tunnels.

Caleb is not so simple, he is not an ordinary scumbag, but the leader of a militant anti-fascist group. The main problem with the homegrown Antifa, with their mohawks, tattoos and spiked baseball bats, is their delicious stupidity. In search of a secret May Day meeting of the Nazis, they wander into some kind of malarial swamp, from where the girl ends up at that very May Day.

The leader of the movement, the charmingly nervous Professor Lawrence (Simon Rex), speaks no less pompous nonsense than Caleb, but turns out to be quite a gentleman whom the heroine cannot, no matter how hard she tries, seduce. The most shocking thing she encounters in the far-right camp is waking up under a blanket embroidered with huge swastikas. However, this is the same instant gag as the episode destined to be included in the anthologies of modern cinema with a man trying in vain to pour himself coffee from a coffee pot riddled with bullet holes.

But even from the dear Lawrence, a specialist in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, from whose fantasies Annabelle-Lillian seems to him, the girl will be carried away by the same mad hurricane. He will carry you away to throw you into the arms of exalted African-American filmmakers, combed and dressed like your “black panthers.” And then – to a secret camp of Islamist terrorists, whose leader Ahmed secretly records electronic music. And then – to a monastery with a abbot who cherishes a bizarre erotic version of the Gospel.

Judging by the open ending, the girl’s wanderings are far from over. Well, they can be interpreted as the wanderings of the “American Dream” in an eternal search for itself.