Sweetheart Deal
Seattle is the third largest and one of the most populated cities in the United States. It is a hub of technology, culture, and industry, while its large port brings it to the rest of the globe. However the new documentary ‘Sweetheart Deal’ by Elisa Levine and the late Gabriel Miller has managed to graphically show all of Seattle through the lens of only one strip of road, Aurora Avenue, which is littered with cheap hotels, fast food restaurant’s and tire shops. The rest of Seattle, with all its richness and variety, does not even exist on Aurora with the exception of the fact that Seattle’s economy supports Aurora as well. Slits window are fitted on the expensive local cars and women interact with the drivers and bargain for what they call their strip pricing. This is how it all looked through the eyes of Levine and Miller’s camera, so indifferent and so objective.
Levine and Miller spent years working in the film. They managed to find four “subjects” Kristine, Krista, Tammy, Sara who are all prostitutes and who are all heavy heroin users. They are dependent on the drugs and pay for their dependence by turning tricks. To say it is “brutal” is an understatement. It’s clear that in order to be embraced in such an intimate way, Levine and Miller had to earn enough trust from the people, who then and there drowned themselves in the universe of Aurora Avenue. A logical link existed and still exists. Mary Ellen Mark, the author of the book and the author of the documentary “Streetwise,” told about Seattle street kids. Highly unstable runaway children seemed to have trusted Mark far too easily. Films like “Streetwise” or “Sweetheart Deal” have as much to do with the creators as they do with the subject of the film. But how on Earth did Levine and Miller earn the trust of these women so much?
Elliott is nicknamed “The Mayor of Aurora,” and he happens to be one good “portal” to the world of Aurora Avenue Elliott. Elliott, who was first introduced to people as a man feeding pigeons around his camper on Aurora Avenue, knows everybody on the block.
He allows women to enter his RV so that they can sleep, have some food, or get out of the cold. These women depend on Elliott for shelter. In this case, he provides them a quiet place to rest with no expectations in return.
The accounts of the four women profiled are different but alarmingly the same. What Tammy’s parents are doing is disgraceful and the worst part is that they continue to do it because they need money for cigarettes. They leech off her ‘earnings’. Kristina was a welder, which she was passionate about, but her dependency made it difficult to sustain a job. The only thing that makes “prostitution tolerable” is, according to her, ‘heroin’. She has a strong temperament. Krista (street name ‘Amy’) comes from a decent family, but her beauty pageant pictures are very deceptive. She went into sex work because she needed to support her habit. Sometimes, when Amy’s mother is in a good mood, Amy goes home to wash up (many women have no home to return to), but she dreams of heroin. Sarah did not only lose her job but had to give up her children too. She’s heard saying over and over again, “I want to disengage with drugs so that I can have my kids back”, but then goes through severe withdrawal. It’s irritating to see her in a cheap motel, arguing over a price with a ‘john’. There is something terribly wrong with this lady’s health that keeps her out of a hospital.
As the movie continues, Elliott’s scenes with these women become more complicated as they start to trust him, and he helps them. However, even so, Tammy has the sense to distance herself. She is an acquaintance of Elliott, but only on her terms. She is shrewd and wise about the ways of the world. In contrast, Amy lacks that kind of wisdom.
“Sweatheart Deal” is based on events that took place over nearly a decade. And in those years, a lot happened, one even reaching the news. About an hour into the film, there are other characters speaking new truths, which require everyone and everything already on screen to be looked at from a new angle. The audience bears the same underwent experience that the women do. The mask is removed. There are many documentaries where the people, or events, seem to progress linearly, but the final product was not their original vision, such as Gimme Shelter, Capturing The Friedmans, or Daughter From Danang. “Sweetheart Deal” has a lot of features from these films as well. It’s like you’ve been stuck in a bad dream and when the moment comes that you finally manage to pull yourself out of it, everything feels so satisfying. The reality is tucked away so deep that it comes to mind as disgusting, but at least it is far preferable to being deceived.
Cinematography by Gabriel Miller is frontal like a lyric but sorrowful at the same time. Shadows and drenched pavements fade into neon and then again into cheap fluorescent lights. All these juxtapose with AURORA‘s cheap colourful aesthetics in the most unpleasant of ways. Footage of these women is extremely personal. They let us enter their worst lives. It so happens that the film is handled in such a way that it doesn’t seem offensive at all.
Elliott comes as a reference to Sherlock Holmes several times and the character seems to impress him a lot. There is a moment when he says he is akin to Sherlock. At some point, a dopesick Sarah is in the back of the RV, and Elliott puts in her view a ‘Sherlock’ DVD to watch. It’s in the nature of a filmmaker to turn those disparate references ten years in the making into a pattern or at least a theme. The key difference between Sherlock Holmes and other famous detectives was that he constructed his case based on the information within the case. He used his observation skills to pull together the inconspicuous pieces of information. “Sweetheart Deal” functions in a very similar manner.
No investigation features so much as a magnifying glass in “Sweetheart Deal.” The answers are evident earlier on; they are right there in the open. “Sweetheart Deal” is a straightforward work. There is no point in trying to varnish the picture because it presents too much grief. However, in the same manner that “Tiny” turned out to be the ‘star’ of “Streetwise,” to the extent that people reminiscence about her 40 years down the line, Kristina, Krista, Tammy, and Sarah become so weighty after meeting them, one would never forget them.
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