The Sweet East (2023)
Directed by Sean Price Williams
A high school senior from South Carolina gets her first glimpse of the wider world, picturesque cities, and woods of the Eastern seaboard on a class trip to Washington, D.C.
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What critics compared The Sweet East to
He offers Lillian a place to stay, in a home decorated almost entirely with figurative red flags, and while his name might be Lawrence, the famous banned book he most evokes is not Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” but Nabakov’s “Lolita.” Like Nabakov himself, the character has a keen interest in lepidoptery, and like Nabakov’s notorious antihero Humbert Humbert, he is queasily obsessed with Annabel Leigh/Lee, Humbert’s first obsession in “Lolita,” named for Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem, of which Lawrence is also a big fan. When Lillian tells Lawrence that her name is Annabel, he can barely conceal his excitement.
Williams works in the same cool and intimate style here as he does in his other projects, which include cinematography for the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, Owen Kline’s Funny Pages and music videos for Brockhampton and A$AP Rocky.
The Sweet East, which Perry produced, doesn't use nonprofessional actors like in the Safdies' Heaven Knows What, but it does attempt to take a societal temperature of the here and now that's similar to the directors' Good Time.
Williams, who worked with the Safdies in 2017’s “Good Time,” finds his protagonist in Lillian (Talia Ryder), a nonchalant teen from South Carolina who gets separated from her class during a high-school trip to Washington.
As a cinematographer, Price Williams made a name for himself working with filmmakers like Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip) and Josh and Benny Safdie (Heaven Knows What, Good Time), lending their films an earthy sense of immediacy.