Quiver Distribution
There are always more of those director/writer/actor indie movies that show up, and often they can be quite self-involved and annoying. When it’s just director/writer without acting in it, that’s often more likely to be more interesting — but it’s much rarer to have unestablished co-writers that also star in the movie. But having multiple points of view can really make all the difference.
Sweet Parents comes from director David Bly, and co-written by him and Leah Rudick, who also star in the movie (their first feature writing credit). They play a couple, Will and Gabby, living in the big city with big dreams. Gabby is an aspiring sculptor, although her work proceeds slowly and she lacks any good contacts. Will wants to own his own restaurant, but is struggling in the meantime as a chef with overbearing, awful managers. Although they live in a tiny apartment, they are very close, and still support each other through their struggles — at first.
But after Will quits his latest abusive restaurant to search for another, their time begins to split a bit more. A random conversation with friends reveals a young man who has a ‘sugar daddy’ that pays for everything for him, including a loft in the city — and the implication is that he doesn’t mind the physical part of it because it’s otherwise so difficult to live in the city.
Things begin to change when Gabby gets approached by someone she knows, an older man who was a famous architect decades earlier, named Oscar (character actor Casey Biggs, putting on an okay Brazilian accent). Although it is unclear whether or not Oscar is interested in Gabby for her artistic promise, romantically, or both, he offers a great deal of opportunities for her to become successful — free trips, spaces to work, potential contacts.
Although Will has found a decent job in the meantime, he is not happy when he finds out about Gabby’s new friend — and thus very intentionally takes advantage of an opportunity that comes up to offer to ‘cook dinner for’ an elegant lady perhaps twenty years older, Guylaine (Barbara Weetman). Although Will’s excuse is that he wants her help to find and invest in a new restaurant he can run, it’s all muddled and conflicted.
An interesting thing about the screenplay is how it is unafraid to show a complicated relationship between the two people, people who care about each other but perhaps care about their dreams more. And that drives a lot of the conflict, because sometimes one or the other can be quite annoying, to a point that makes you think it could never last.
The nature of the movie’s plot is a bit contrived, but the contrivance does allow asking a more interesting question — what the nature of sacrifice is when it comes to achieving your artistic dream. It goes in directions that feel fairly predictable from an indie movie perspective, but it has a good enough pace that it feels like a reasonable conclusion.
The two lead actors have a pretty good, naturalistic style, and the directing is decent enough, if usually a bit basic. I’m already a fan of Casey Biggs from his role on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, so accent aside, I really liked what he did here, and Barbara Weetman had a similar subtlety to her performance. Hard to say who would really like this sort of low stakes movie, but perhaps the ‘sugar daddy’ subversion might get you a bit more interested than otherwise.
Planning to see Sweet Parents? Click below to see the movie, and be sure to come back and tell us what you thought!
Sweet Parents has a run time of 1 hour 48 minutes and is not rated.
Quiver Distribution
Share this post
