I will come clean and admit I don’t watch many documentaries anymore. I can’t bear it. They have become persuasive essays, aka propaganda that tells you what to think without offering an objective viewpoint, which is essential to a great documentary. So I was hesitant to watch Sweetheart Deal, as I am every documentary now. But I was wrong. It is one of the best films I’ve seen in a while and I highly recommend it.
Sweetheart Deal is startling, horrifying, haunting, and ultimately moving. It follows forgotten people, sex workers in Seattle’s Aurora avenue (highway 99), who sell their bodies for heroin. So you think, okay, why would I watch something that depressing? Here’s why: It’s great storytelling. Somehow, this documentary tells a good story where so many narrative features fail. Why, because it doesn’t try to dump a “message” on you. It is telling you, simply, “this is what happened.”
What keeps us watching is the mystery unfolding of one of the people the film tracks: an old man in a camper who sees himself as the caretaker of the girls. They knock on his door and shoot up drugs, and he listens to them, tends to their wounds, and helps them when they try to kick the habit. He keeps them safe like he keeps a captured pigeon safe.
I don’t want to spoil the film, but I just want to say that what his “help” turns out to be is shocking and disturbing. I watched it yesterday and have been unable to forget it. The tension in the story is in watching these women claw their way out of addiction and sex work to try to find some kind of normal life outside the hellhole of their lives.
This isn’t a story that ranks people, as in: white women are less sympathetic than women of color, or members of the LGBTQIA community – it would suck so bad if it went down that road. So it is, mercifully, not “woke,” as one might say. There are plenty of documentaries out there that cover those specific issues, but this one was just telling a story, and boy, oh boy, what a story it is.
Even more astonishing is that this is Director/Producer Elisa Levine’s directorial debut.
The awards industry votes for documentaries the way it votes for political candidates, which is why so many documentaries are PSAs, essentially, like Will & Harper, for instance. They want you to think something, so they tell the story a certain way. However, Levine has chosen not to do that, which might explain why the film was not nominated for the Critics Choice awards, though it should have been.
I haven’t paid much attention to the Documentary race lately because of this: We’re bombarded with documentaries that tell us how to think, or they are puff pieces about a political figure they wish to uplift (like James Carville). But I remember the days when there were real documentaries that told us a story without telling us how to think about that story. I miss those days.
Sweetheart Deal is a grand slam. The filmmakers were so up close and personal with these women that they stayed with them through their recovery and through the horrific story of what happened to them when someone they thought they knew took advantage of them. In fact, the filmmakers themselves had no idea what trajectory the story would take, making it almost a thriller. If they had no idea where the film was headed, they could not tell us how we should see the central figures. We don’t know. We find out as the story unfolds.
Bravo to all involved. I hope the film gets the attention it deserves.
Sean Baker’s Anora is also a film that centers on a sex worker and does so without judgment. He doesn’t shy away from what the job entails, how dehumanizing it can be when you let your guard down and try to form real relationships. As it happens, I follow several sex workers on TikTok. I’m not sure why, exactly. I’m fascinated by who they are as people, how they can do what they do and how they feel about it. I prefer the truth, in all ways. I hate being told what to think. I also worry for them, as anyone would. I want to know they are safe. The subjects of Sweetheart Deal live such a risky lifestyle that they could die at any moment for any reason.
But the film mercifully shows them grabbing on by their fingernails and lifting themselves up out of the pits of hell. We root for them, we applaud them, even if we still worry for them. Recovery is a day-by-day thing. I should know. One of my dearest friends, an ex-boyfriend who had kicked the heroin habit for ten years before I met him, overdosed during COVID lockdowns. He texted me one hour before. After I heard he died, I texted him back, stupidly. I thought he couldn’t be gone just like that. But he was gone, just like that.
Any of these women living on the fringe as they do could meet the same fate, one way or another.
The important thing here is that this story was told at all and told plainly and honestly.
Sweetheart Deal opens this Friday in select theaters.
