Sweetheart review – good-natured caravan-park romance | Film
The vacation romance coming-of-ager is the style that’s given writer-director Marley Morrison her likable function debut. And when you thought Ammonite was going to be this yr’s solely homosexual love story set in Dorset, assume once more. AJ (Nell Barlow) is a brilliant, intense, socially tough and lonely teen who wears a bucket hat and aviator shades, and whose overbearing mum Tina (Jo Hartley) nonetheless insists on calling her by her childhood identify of “April”, sadly abbreviated to “Ape”. In a fiercely misjudged try to get AJ to cheer up and buck up, she insists on taking her on an old style household getaway to a vacation park in Dorset, alongside together with her youthful sister Dayna (Tabitha Byron), pregnant older sister Lucy (Sophia di Martino) and Lucy’s easygoing companion Steve (Samuel Anderson).
Grumpy, defiant and unconvinced by her mum’s self-congratulatory and ostentatious rejection of homophobia, AJ retreats behind her headphones and her guide – however then she sees the charismatic and glamorous lifeguard Isla (Ella-Rae Smith) by the pool, who appears to be actually interested in her. However Isla additionally, worryingly, appears to haven’t any scarcity of enticing however silly guys hanging round her.
The ensuing spark is the form of miracle that perhaps actually solely occurs within the films, however it doesn’t cease this being a good-natured love story, doomed to flower and fade within the area of a single vacation, abandoning the standard coming-of-age realisation that family and friends are what’s essential proper now. Morrison makes good use of the faintly bizarre places of the vacation park and its static caravans. (Claire Oakley’s current movie Make Up used a vacation park for a horror movie.) And Hartley has a pleasant line when she seems to be sadly at AJ and murmurs, nearly to herself: “You don’t half appear to be your dad … ”
Sweetheart is launched on 24 September in cinemas.
