In Melanie Oates’s Sweet Angel Baby, a small fishing town rests calmly against the roiling and raging Labrador Sea. Everything moves with the grain in town — if you grow up here, you either move away or stay forever, marrying your high school sweetheart and aging into your parents, maybe with a bigger and more expensive house. You go to church diligently, and when developers from the city threaten to buy the land the church sits on, you organize a fundraiser so that the church can buy the land it rests on. Life in the town stays small and the same, putting up a fight against modern encroachments.
Ostensibly, Eliza (Michaela Kurimsky) moves according to the town’s usual currents: she lives in a small house near her parents, picks up bread from her mother’s, works as a waitress at the local fish and chips shop, and attends church religiously with her grandmother. When the developers make a move for the church, it’s her idea to raise money. She organizes the fundraiser, a bingo night, creates ballots, and collects donations. Everybody knows her name, for hers is a quiet but beloved presence. But Eliza harbors a secret — it’s not something terrible so much as it is a shadow of her public persona.
When she’s done participating in the life of the town, Eliza sneaks away into the lush forest skirting the settlement, or picks her way amongst the secluded rocky beaches and cliffs rolling into the sea, strips, puts a mask on or fans her hair across her face, and takes pictures for a secret social media page. The page is full of beautifully orchestrated photographs that Eliza has taken of herself, posed delicately and suggestively in various states of undress. It’s an account that serves as an outlet for her artistic sensibilities and a kinkier aspect of her personality that she sheathes from others around her. When a town member learns of her secret account and leaks it to others, it spreads on the vicious current of local gossip and threatens to upend the life Eliza has built for herself.
Sweet Angel Baby is a delicate study of how the more nefarious aspects of life in a town, all that the underbelly conceals, can damage a psyche. It’s delicate in the sense that it is tender and subtle, nothing quite so horrific as a Lynchian study. Oates paints the townsfolk with a sympathetic brush, seeming to understand their psyche and working to have us understand, too. There are pressures each person faces in the face of others, there is a status quo that yokes each town member to it, with the collective lashing out against the one who walks against the grain. It’s a mentality that isn’t villainized here so much as it is laid bare, something Oates accomplishes through a beholdenness to Eliza’s perspective.
Through Oates’s perspective, Eliza emerges as a sweet and unruly force. As Kurimsky plays her under Oates’s direction, Eliza is a deeply sensitive, creative, and yearning soul, feeling at home within the wild and rough nature that surrounds her; she is truly happy with her life in the town before things go belly-up. She nurtures an at-first-casual romantic relationship with Toni (played with such formidable grace by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers), a co-worker at the fish and chips shop, but it is evident that the two women like each other more than they let on. Everything, though, is made more urgent when Eliza’s online identity is made public.
The townsfolk around her respond with the expected prudishness and judgmentalness, apprehension of which caused Eliza to create her photographs in secret in the first place, and make mountains out of molehills when they inflate and inspect every innocuous aspect of her life. She is met with further queerphobia for her relationship with Toni. It leaves Eliza incredibly upset and aching to find that even her mother looks at her differently. An anchor throughout the upheaval is Toni, and Oates has the women’s relationship work as steady ground within the turbulent and antagonist current suddenly raging through the usually calm town.
Sweet Baby Angel is, in a sense, a coming of age tale, for the way in which it takes the awful exposure that is unceremoniously foisted upon Eliza and turns it into a generative force. Oates has Eliza consider her soul, its core components, what makes her happy — all aspects of the self that she, along with many of us, has put off considering in the hum and ease of everyday life, and asks her to make a choice. Oates has Eliza consider what in her life she wants to stay the same and what she can do away with, in effect, about her future. Eliza’s Instagram is an important part of her, it’s how she expresses herself, how she challenges herself artistically, and when it is shamed by others, she needs to figure out whether she is strong enough to continue with her passion. It’s a belated coming-of-age for the adult Eliza, dealing a lesson many of us could use: is comfort worth the price of our soul’s joy?
The newfound exposure and the negative response she is receiving, Oates seems to show Eliza, says more about the town’s need to grow and acclimatize to newness, than it does anything viscerally damaging about Eliza; it speaks volumes of the town’s need to shake off dated views, to keep only the more communal aspects that serve others. This may be a simple adage, but it is one whose truth is tough to grasp, uncomfortable to seek out. Just as Sweet Angel Baby is a coming of age tale for Eliza, it seems also to be a coming of age tale for the town, showing it that not all aspects of modernity are to be fought against, that even as communal love might be different, it is also salutary.
The magic of this film is that it allows Eliza the strength through Toni to move forward in life with an even firmer handle and understanding of her art, her queerness, and her bliss. Sweet Angel Baby is delicate and tender, and even as terrible things happen to Eliza, there is a sense that Oates will keep this character safe through the love she provides her in Toni, a love that allows the strength and courage to ease into herself with greater determination, to actualize herself like never before. This film is, more than anything, instructive as it shows that happiness and love are not only possible, but also that sometimes one beckons the other.
