Sweet Angel Baby

By Melanie Oates

Screening at the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival on Tue Oct 22, 7pm at the Majestic Theatre | Tickets here

Reviewed by Eva Crocker

 

The 35th annual St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival opens on October 22nd with a screening of Melanie Oates’ debut feature film Sweet Angel Baby.  

Sweet Angel Baby is set a in fictional community in rural Newfoundland where, as is the case in many real communities across the island at the moment, the church is being sold off in a court-supervised liquidation of assets to pay survivors of sexual abuse perpetrated by priests and Christian Brothers. The protagonist, Eliza, is the youngest member of a fundraising committee who hope to buy back the church through raffles and events like bingo and dances. 

However, as the film progresses Eliza’s sexuality comes to jeopardize her position in the community.

Sweet Angel Baby relishes the unusual beauty of the Newfoundland dialect without ever falling into caricature or feeling unnatural. A strength of the script is that it leaves room for Michaela Kurimsky to give Eliza depth through her expressive face and her restrained delivery of the lines. Kurimsky conveys Eliza’s complex relationship to her own sexuality with a physicality that communicates a quiet confidence. When relatives suggest she wear more make-up and gently assure her she’s attractive enough to find a husband if she just tried a little harder, Kurimsky gently brushes them off, suggesting her character takes comfort in people’s misinterpretations of her.  She doesn’t feel a need to confront or correct people’s assumptions about why she is unmarried, instead she explores her sexuality through covert relationships and an anonymous Instagram account.

In a feat of visual storytelling, we gain access to Eliza’s interiority through the sexy photos she takes for her popular Instagram account. The props in her sensual photoshoots reveal things about her relationships with the people and striking natural world that surrounds her. The photos are a space where Eliza makes sense of the different elements that have made her who she is – a loaf of bread baked by her mother, goblets from the soon to be sold off church, and the head of a moose shot by her neighbor, all find their way into her striking images. The photos are intimate in the sense that they show her nude body and depict her as a sexual person, but also in the sense that they reveal what is truly important to her. When the account is uncovered by an untrustworthy person, the fear we feel for Eliza is visceral. 

As the film progresses, the community’s unprocessed anger and shame about the sexual abuse perpetrated by priests and Christian Brothers seems to become focused on Eliza. Working in traditions like Andy Jones’ unapologetic naming of the abuse taking place in the church in Codco and later, Joel Thomas Hynes’ rich portrayals of the sometimes cruel social politics of life in contemporary rural Newfoundland, in Sweet Angel Baby Melanie Oates tackles these taboo themes with a fresh perspective. In spite of being a film that wrestles with the shroud of fear, guilt, and danger that Catholicism casts on sexuality, it also makes room for the pleasure of  being unrepentant in one’s own unique sexual expression. 

Eva Crocker is a freelance editor and author. Her debut novel All I Ask won the 2020 BMO Winterset Award. Her short story collection Barreling Forward was shortlisted for Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQS2 Writers and the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers. It won the Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction and the CAA Emerging Author’s Award, and was a National Post Best Book. Her new novel Back in the Land of the Living was published by House of Anansi Press in August 2023. She is completing a PhD in the Interdisciplinary Humanities department at Concordia University, where she is studying visual art as a resistance to resource extraction.

 

October, 2024