Sugar: When Eye Candy Meets Nose Candy
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
In Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning satiric film, Triangle of Sadness, a couple of attractive young models and “influencers” find themselves on an all-expenses cruise, which goes badly wrong.
Something vaguely similar happens in Sugar, the new Prime Video made-in-Canada drama, inspired by a real-life story. In 2016, two Quebec women, Isabelle Legacé and Melina Roberge, were free travellers on a high-end cruise, who posted extensively to followers on Instagram and Facebook.
When they reached their destination in Sydney, Australia, they were arrested for attempting to import about $30-million worth of cocaine into the country. The case gained international attention, not only for the brazenness of the crime, but because of a handy selection of sexy vacation cruise pictures to run with the story.
Instagramers turned coke smugglers Melanie (Jasmine Sky Sarin) and Chloe (Katherine McNamara)
Sugar, which was shot by veteran Canadian director and cinematographer, Vic Sarin, is billed by Prime Video as a “cautionary tale” about the dark side of social media, which suggests that this is a film somewhat akin to Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, about teen criminals who began raiding celebrities homes for trophies.
Even Roberge’s Australian sentencing judge moralized about social media: “It is a very sad indictment on her relative age group in society to seem to get self-worth relative to posts on Instagram. This highlights the negative influence of social media on young women.”
That sounds akin to saying car commercials are responsible for drive-by shootings: The crime here wasn’t posting those grammable images, but trafficking the stuff that comes in kilogram bricks.
What we get here is a superficial movie about the dangers of superficiality, with lots of duck-lipped selfies and cleavage shots. We first meet head-turner Chloe (Katherine McNamara) as she arrives at a Montreal nightclub, where she meets up with her sketchy boyfriend/agent Jules (Éric Bruneau). Her job for the evening is to sit with some strangers and encourage them to drink.
Chloe ditches the table when one of the men is overly handsy. She heads back to Jules’ table. She finds him sitting with a newcomer, Melanie (Jasmine Sky Sarin, the director’s daughter), who has just sneaked into the club. Melanie, the daughter of a humble small town mechanic, works a dead-end clerk job in a jewelry store and fantasizes about a life like Chloe’s: Wearing flashy threads, hanging out in nightclubs and getting free stuff.
In real life (IRL?), Chloe owes a lot of money to the bad gangster guy because of her past coke addiction, and she has already tapped her parents dry. When Jules pressures her to take a cruise and make some fast cash, she doesn’t figure she has much choice about it. She recruits the naïve Melanie to go along with her.
Their only job, she explains, is to pretend to be the hot vacation dates of some shady guys who were up to something the girls don’t need to know about. Predictably, the shady guys prove progressively shadier with the arrival of their boss, played by Armand Assante, as a grim old mobster, who stares at Chloe like a famished vampire. Soon Chloe and Melanie are compelled to cross the line between willing to coerced accomplices.
Director Sarin plays around a little with the candy-coloured palette, with lots of quick snapshots and backdrops (shot in Montreal and Mexico), giving the film a sort of photoplay episodic structure. But there’s little dramatic build-up. And while co-stars McNamara and Sarin (in real life a successful YouTube influencer) are credible as girls gone feral, the half-dozen male characters on board are little more than ballast.
In a jailhouse coda, Melanie tells her heartbroken dad that she just “wanted to be seen,” a pop psych cliché with contrary meanings — either to be admired and acknowledged or exposed. It brings to mind Lily Tomlin’s pre-Instagram famous line: “I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.”
Sweet. Directed by Vic Sarin. Written by Ben Johnstone, Annelies Kavan and Vic Sarin. Starring: Katherine McNamara, Jasmine Sky Sarin, Eric Bruneau and Armand Assante. Available now on Prime Video.