Teen cinema is full of angsty outsiders, social climbers and mouthpieces for current pop culture, but rare are the coming-of-age films that dare to privilege sincerity – an uncool sensibility that can cut through the adolescent din with lovely, unforced levity.
In Nyul Nyul/Yawuru filmmaker Jub Clerc's breezy, heartfelt debut feature Sweet As, a group of misfit teens embark on a supervised road trip through Western Australia's Pilbara region, where they bond with each other – and commune with Country – in refreshing, unabashedly hopeful ways.
It's a film with the warm, casual optimism of the expression from which it takes its title.
Opening against the desolate, eerily pretty coastal town of Port Hedland, the film centres on Murra (Shantae Barnes-Cowan, from ABC TV's Total Control) a 15-year-old Indigenous teen trying to negotiate life with her strung-out single mother (Ngaire Pigram, ABC TV's Mystery Road). In what seems to be a regular occurrence, Murra barricades herself in her bedroom while mum holds an early-hours weeknight bender with a bunch of random dudes, one of whom tries to force the teenager's door open. Soon, a cop shows up. It all appears headed for grim, depressingly familiar terrain.
But in an early sign of Clerc's emphasis on care, the local officer turns out to be Murra's kindly uncle (Mark Coles Smith, Mystery Road: Origin), who takes his niece in for safekeeping, and – much to her initial chagrin – bundles her off to a mobile camp for "at-risk" teens.
"Be safe, listen to Country, and stay out of trouble," he advises her, with gentle affection.
Clerc and cinematographer Katie Milwright's clean, unfussy landscapes have an evocative sense of isolation, capturing a world of tract housing dwarfed by mining ships and industrial silos; a surefire breeding ground for teen malaise – or worse.
The teenagers that join Murra on the camping trip are products of this environment; the kind of classic, movie summer-camp kids whose parents would rather send them away than deal with their children's problems head on.
There's Kylie (spirited newcomer Mikayla Levy), a trash-talking white girl with bleached highlights whose much-older boyfriend could be her mum's lover (and might in fact be); Elvis (Pedrea Jackson, Blueback), an Indigenous kid whose cocky loverman schtick is clearly a mask for some domestic trauma; and Sean (Andrew Wallace, also making his debut), a pasty, sensitive soul who's landed a spot on the trip on account of his suicidal ideation. (The Kimberley region, where Clerc spent time growing up, has the highest youth suicide rate in Australia.)
Before they hit the road, their camp counsellors – 40-something Indigenous local Mitch (Tasma Walton, Mystery Road) and 20-something Nicaragua-born backpacker Fernando (Carlos Sanson Jr) – confiscate the kids' mobile phones and arm them with retro film cameras, encouraging them to live in the moment.
"You have to take the time and see the story that is in front of you," Fernando tells his charges, determined to impart his passion for photography.
Murra quickly takes to the medium, and her visual diary – which Clerc illustrates with recurring freeze frames and scrawled teenage poetry – becomes the lens of her spiritual awakening.
Clerc, who grew up between Port Hedland and Broome during the 80s, was dispatched on a similar camp for at-risk teens — a "photo safari" with National Geographic — and has said that Sweet As was inspired by that experience.
The filmmaker's expressive segment of 2013's anthology film The Turning, which caught the blush of first attraction between two kids at the beach, demonstrated her feel for the tenderness of teen experience, and she brings a similar sense of adolescent abandon to the escapades here.
Sweet As hits its sweet spot in sequences of freewheeling juvenile mischief, as the four kids break out of their motel, score some goon, and tool around in the dead of night: splash-bombing a public pool, howling like dingoes at a dirt kart track, dodging predatory construction workers beneath a water tower that looks like a marooned UFO.
That these teens will eventually bond is a given in this sort of movie, but Clerc is just as interested in the relationship that develops between the kids and the landscape in which they're immersed – a nurturing, spiritual force that she paints as so much bigger than the societal problems of the present.
In one loaded moment, a cool lagoon seems to draw out Murra's sexual awakening as she beckons Fernando in for a dip, while the rocky outcrops entice Sean to the precipice of an abyss.
That charged sequence is quickly diffused – perhaps too easily, as with other moments of conflict in the film. The script, by Clerc and actor-turned-writer Steve Rodgers (Goldstone), might have tightened the dramatic screws, teasing out the tension in ways that would allow the emotional pay-offs to hit harder.
Still, angst isn't necessarily Clerc's goal, and the film's gentleness is part and parcel of its purview – one that chooses hope, and resolution, over trauma.
The darkness is ever present, but Clerc has elected to take the road less travelled: one of lightness and positivity, affording these kids moments of community and transcendence in a world whose future remains uncertain.
The filmmaker's approach is embodied in the intelligent lead performance by Barnes-Cowan, whose sharp eyes betray a life lived beyond her years yet manage to convey a childlike sense of discovery and openness to life.
There's something to be said for the film's willingness to do the same.
Sweet As is in cinemas from June 1.
