Sweetheart: Grumpy Brit Teen Lesbian Finds Summer Love in Cozy Coming-of-Age Debut

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

Sweetheart, a coming-of-age first feature from Marley Morrison, has a cozy familiarity to it.

AJ, the 17-year-old English girl who is the protagonist of Marley Morrison’s coming-of-age debut feature, wears a white bucket hat and tinted aviator glasses, revealing little of her face except a sullen pout. She looks, unexpectedly, a lot like Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

She’s played by a young actress named Nell Barlow and she’s winning as an awkward, body-shy teen-ager being dragged along on a family summer vacation. She’d much prefer staying home alone but, as she says in voice-over, her over-protective mother, Tina, thinks, “I’d become a heroin addict — in a week.”

AJ’s obsessed with global warming and girls, but is pessimistic about her chances with either. Dad has recently been tossed from the family for bad behavior, and AJ was nearly expelled from school last term for similar reasons. Now she has a vague plan to end her education and go to Indonesia to help “knit jumpers for elephants” who are freezing because of climate change. 

Her mother is understandably skeptical. 

“Why can’t I just do what I want?” AJ demands.

“Because it changes every five minutes, April,” says her mother, Tina. (Among other annoyances, her mother refuses to call her AJ.)

Tina (Jo Hartley), in an attempt to cheer AJ up, has taken her on a family vacation to a caravan park on the seaside in Dorset. The family entourage includes AJ’s eight-year-old sister, Dayna (Tabitha Byron), who AJ is expected to babysit, and a pregnant older sister Lucy (Sophia Di Martino) who is accompanied by her unfailingly empathetic boyfriend, Steve (Samuel Anderson). 

What promises to be a summer bummer takes a promising turn when AJ meets Isla (Ella-Rae Smith), a lissome, openly flirty lifeguard, who invites her to join the young resort staff for a family-free late-night party. 

Like AJ herself, Sweetheart feels a bit awkward, from AJ’s intermittent sardonic voice-over to the montages set to shoe-gazing soundtrack tunes. But there’s one twist that’s new. AJ’s working-class family are entirely accepting about AJ’s sexuality. They’re just really clumsy about it. 

Tina wonders what’s wrong with being a little bit more feminine, “like whatshername —that lesbian actress who's in that film where they all get stuck in a room." (Jodie Foster in Panic Room.) "She's a lesbian and you'd never be able to tell just by looking at her.”

Lucy’s observations of sympathy aren’t much better: “A lot of gay people are depressed,” she explains to Tina, while AJ seethes.

When the night of the teen party comes, AJ bails on the hokey magic show, and heads off to meet her new friend. The evening is filled with anxious hope: Isla really seems to be into her, but then, Isla has a lot of guys hanging around her as well. Many drinks are drunk before AJ totters home back to the trailer, where her mother is incensed. Worse still, a day later AJ leaves her baby sister alone in the pool, and the little girl wanders off. Embarrassments, revelations and family set-tos follow, while AJ struggles with her new infatuation.

Isla is a character both readily accessible, but ultimately unobtainable. She’s a summer fling but also a life-changer, someone to give AJ hope and a new perspective on her own mother’s and sisters, in a film where coziness and good intentions are more important than inevitable misunderstandings.

Sweetheart. Written and directed by Marley Morrison. Starring: Nell Barlow, Jo Hartley, Ella-Rae Smith, Sophia Di Martino, Samuel Anderson and Tabitha Byron. Sweetheart is available on VOD and digital viewing on Feb. 10.