Sugar Daddy: A budding musician joins the gig economy as a sex worker in this idiosyncratic-yet-familiar film
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
A portrait of a young woman composer with a side hustle as a sex worker, Sugar Daddy, is a copacetic collaboration between writer-star Kelly McCormack and filmmaker Wendy Morgan. Morgan makes her feature debut here, after a career in TV and music videos with stars like Janelle Monáe and Alicia Keys.
Sugar Daddy impresses as an idiosyncratic film with a forceful visual style and sound design, attached to a familiar story about the ways of bad men and a young woman getting lost in the fast life.
Musician Darren (Kelly McCormack) stimulates her creativity by dancing alone in Sugar Daddy.
The contemporary twist is that the film is about the low-hanging fruit of the gig economy, sex work through the so-called sugar-dating web sites. One such site has recently snared Republic congressman, Matt Gaetz in a human trafficking scandal. The subject also provides the premise of another recent Canadian movie, the witty comedy Shiva Baby. (See Linda Barnard’s review here).
The opening scene of Sugar Daddy sees two lookalike blond women, sisters Darren and Rae (Kelly McCormack and her real-life sister, Hilary McCormack), on a beach, trilling along to the (off-screen) recording of a Maria Callas opera — and smoking.
The image evoked two reactions in me, one that the film probably intended and the other not. First, the scene suggests Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 beach-set feminine crisis drama, Persona. Second, the smoking annoyed me. True, Callas (whose voice comes back later in the film as a sort of signifier of private passion) smoked heavily. But smoking, particularly for an aspiring singer today, seems indefensibly stupid. (Yeah, I know, Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga).
The explanation, I guess, is that Darren is a contrarian and a rebel. (Also, curling smoke is a dreamy visual effect.)
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
The beach scene takes place during Darren’s brief homecoming for a family funeral. She asks her sister Rae if their father, who is estranged from the family for unexplained reasons, might show up. but he doesn’t.
We learn that Darren has moved to Toronto and has dropped out of university to pursue a career in music. Her mother, whom she treats with sullen disgust, worries about her. The backstory about the parental breakup is not found in the script, though it’s a safe bet that Darren has daddy issues.
Back in the city, Darren promptly loses a catering job for stealing food. She heads to a music store and bangs on a piano, makes a run on a bass drum and pounds on some drums, and gets turned down for a job there.
Things are getting tense: She’s behind on her rent to her landlord, a grad student named Peter (Ishan Davé) who has a crush on her and mostly tolerates her loud music and tardy rent payments.
On a tip from a fellow former caterer, Darren signs up as “Dee” on a dating site, where young women receive money and gifts from rich older men for “companionship.”
Darren’s first date sees her at a fancy gown store with a burly older gent (Nicholas Campbell) who buys her some fancy dresses (she looks suspiciously at a dress decorated with crosses) and sets up a regular date. He lies to park with her, while he plays classical music on his car radio.
A better catch is a suave rich lawyer named Gordon (Colm Feore) who seems genuinely interested in her, takes her to fancy dinners and even an art opening. Suddenly, Darren has the cash to buy all the musical gear she wants, enough to make home videos of her dancing and singing in her room to her own electronic music.
While Sugar Daddy seems timely in its theme of patriarchal power and exploitation, in other ways, this is familiar ground. Movies and the selling of sex have a long history. It’s a subject that provides both prurience and high-minded social commentary.
(According to the web site, Oscarhookers.com, 100 percent of Best Actress Oscar winners have played sex workers of some stripe in their careers).
Curiously, there has even been a movie on this specific subject —Stephan Littger’s 2015 New York-set drama, Her Composition, about a musical grad student, paying for her education as an escort, in a film with a similar scene of the protagonist apparently composing by dancing in her room in subjective reverie.
In Darren’s case, the performances get increasingly odd — daubing paint on her face, stripping down, writhing about, and in one scene, simulating vomiting in the midst of impressionistic dance. These sequences stand apart from the generally earnestly-acted drama, and I wish they were more interesting, rather than feeling like outtakes from heavy metal music videos.
It’s unclear how talented Darren is supposed to be. McCormack is consistently intense and sings decently. But her character seems unable to pick a musical lane.
The eclectic score includes Rachmaninov and Mozart, The Roches, some rap and and predominantly, whooshy and throbbing electronic compositions from Montreal musician, Marie-Helene L. Delorme, aka Foxtrott.
As expected, the parts of Darren’s double life collide. At an art gallery with her Gordon, she meets a poised professional woman, Alida (Kaniehtiio Horn) who turns out to be a record executive. Later, at a studio, Alida gives Darren some career and life advice, warning her that a producer who has shown an interest is really only after sex: “It’s always like that, Darren. You should know this.”
In Sugar Daddy, you should know, men are always like that. In a late-breaking development, Darren’s sister tells her, without explanation, that she was wrong to idolize her dad. Jim, the car guy, crosses the intimacy line when he asks her to go to sit with him while he takes a nap. And Pete, the roommate, won’t accept that Darren keeps him in the “friend zone,” so he cruelly outs her new gig at her birthday party.
That leads her friends to turn the party into what amounts to an undergraduate seminar on gender and sexual commodity. They express a range of views, though no takes the position that what consenting people do in privacy is not anyone else’s business.
Gordon, her suave older friend, goes from father figure to demeaning client, after what she thought was a truthful emotional moment between them. She asks him: “If you had a daughter, would you tell her not to do this?”
This is a plausible question to ask people who have positive opinions about sex work. I believe the ethical answer is, you can care deeply about your kid’s physical and psychological well-being and still recognize you have no business dictating what another adult legally does with her body.
Unless it comes to smoking, in which case I would definitely be righteously pissed.
Sugar Daddy. Directed by Wendy Morgan. Written by Kelly McCormack. Starring; Kelly McCormack, Colm Feore, Nicolas Campbell, Kaniehtiio Horn and Ishan Davé. Sugar Daddy is available on video on demand on April 6.