The main thing that kept coming to mind throughout this is that it felt very much like a structural and thematic remake of the 1960s Gerry O’Hara STD transmission drama That Kind Of Girl (which I very much prefer), although I guess there are only so many ways to approach this subject of an affair having both short term emergency consequences (the need for the innocent party to themselves have to get tested) and longer term relationship ones. Sweet As You Are has two great performances from Miranda Richardson (albeit rather overwrought, though I wonder if that is intentionally so, in order to push her otherwise entirely blameless character more towards the unsympathetic side?) and Liam Neeson (whose character is mostly guiltily subdued throughout) so it is definitely worthwhile seeing on that basis, though the part that makes it stand apart from That Kind Of Girl is also its most problematic section, when it tries to place a somewhat irrelevant layer of polemical feminist gender politics on top of what should be a much more specific to that couple interpersonal drama. But that may have shown how much more complicated (curdled?) interpersonal interactions had become over the decades between the two films.
The ‘problematic’ part comes in the mid-section where, in the midst of her crisis about the NHS being able to do the test but it taking two weeks for the results to come back causing Julia to instead go to a shady private clinic (who can get the results back in ‘just’ two days but it will also cost £65 for the blood test), she spends her time fretting about the betrayal by cutting out headlines about sex attackers and rapists from the newspapers and leaves them lying around on the kitchen table in a kind of pointed collage for Martin to find. This then leads to the couple’s worst fight in which Julia says that its never women who instigate these situations but always “men on men; or men on women” and in the worst act of the entire film from out of nowhere in a fit of pique tells Martin to stay away from their pre-pubescent daughter Katie, implying that he could infect their daughter if he does the same to her as he has done to Julia. When that statement understandably enrages Martin, Julia compounds it with physical violence by throwing objects at him, until one particularly violent hit on Martin draws (contaminated) blood, which stops them both in their tracks.
That gets followed up a couple of scenes later by a more subdued reconciliation scene in which Martin talks of the way that all men would take the opportunity he did if it was presented to him, and it is just societal boundaries that stop them. Which if I trusted this film more I would like to have taken as an example of Martin throwing his entire gender under the bus in order to try and escape being held personally responsible for his own specific actions. However when the film also includes a supporting character of one of Martin’s lecherous lecturer colleagues spying on the female students through binoculars to start the whole film off, and then has a later scene in which the same colleague drags Martin out of class to observe a couple of girls in a classroom and do a Dazed and Confused-anticipating comment about how the best part of the job is that “the girls all stay 18 and get refreshed every year. Once they hit 19 they’re too jaded”, that kind of makes it appear as if the film is implying that there is this institutional culture of male predation (or at least one that makes Martin think that he can take the actions he did) rather than just one specific couple’s situation. So that makes Martin saying that its not just him but ‘all Men’ seem like it is a statement that the film itself believes to be the case as well.
This aspect is also compounded by how we never really get an insight into what the couple’s relationship was like pre-HIV diagnosis aside from the opening pan over the idealised family photograph over the opening credits, which perhaps (intentionally? / unintentionally?) raises notions of a kind of brittle female mental instability aspect that was always there under the surface and ready to break through, and maybe would have at some point even without such an intense moment of crisis. Or maybe we are just meant to see this as a woman being mentally destroyed by this specific situation? That this gives so much food for thought in wondering what the specific intentions were behind the somewhat muddied motivations (seeing the introduction by the writer William Nicholson beforehand may perhaps help to shed some light on this complication, since there is the suggestion that he wrote a lot of this story from his ‘Male’ perspective and then it got amended by both female producers and the female director to add elements, along with the actors doing things with their performances, which could suggest the big fight scene was a bit improvised?) and speculation as to what exactly the motivations of the filmmakers in this piece could be is both the aspect that I find particularly troubling, but also makes Sweet As You Are so interesting to mull over as well.
Interestingly in this focus on the relationship between Martin and Julia above all, that marginalises the daughter Katie considerably, but the various moments in which Katie appears actually works well to emphasise the child who is being overlooked and somewhat neglected throughout all of this drama. She is the one who has to endure the blazing rows taking place in the hallway outside of the living room between her parents, and because Julia does not want to tell anyone else in the family about Martin’s HIV diagnosis because of fears of prejudice towards their daughter in particular from their peers (it is quite important to place Sweet As You Are into context of being made in 1988 years before even the famous Eastenders Mark Fowler HIV+ storyline took place in 1991), that leads to Julia and Martin’s fights over a specific situation just seeming like a generally disintegrating marriage between two people who have simply just come to hate each other. There is that moment when Julia is screaming at Martin downstairs about not wanting Katie to be treated differently because of Martin’s behaviour when we get the cut upstairs to Katie in bed wide awake and listening to the muffled row downstairs, which might be the most upsetting moment in the whole drama.
That situation of Julia having to find out about the nature of HIV, and wanting to not let anyone else know about their family situation, perhaps also plays into her mental instability. There is that late scene with Julia’s mother taking her out to dinner in which the mother, probably strongly suspecting an affair, but no more than that, believes that it is just a tiff that all marriages have and that the best thing to do is to double down and have another baby to cement the relationship together better (which kind of horribly implies that Katie was a bit of a dud and isn’t doing the job of that already!), but which also seems to be included in order to lead into the ending:
Spoiler
Where Julia goes back to the private clinic and finds out that her blood is “as pure as Lady Di’s”, but then having the tension of being HIV+ herself lifted from her makes Julia break down as suddenly all of the other questions well up and she has a (deus ex machina) chat with the doctor to air all of her concerns about what happens now and if the other couples he sees in similar situations to hers stay together or not. What about Martin and will he get sick? And what about having those ‘extra’ children her mother suggested, or is that now something that is completely off the table given that Martin is HIV+?
The best part of this film is that for some of the somewhat forced dramatics that has come before, it knows the exactly right moment to end at, as Julia returns home late from the clinic to look in on Katie asleep in her bed (the one true innocent character who will be affected by this situation, whatever happens) and then finds Martin still awake and lying clothed on the bed waiting for her. Martin tells her that he still loves her, and we end on that hung moment of ambivalence of Julia still standing in her coat in the doorway of the bedroom, where things could go either way.
The best part of this film is that for some of the somewhat forced dramatics that has come before, it knows the exactly right moment to end at, as Julia returns home late from the clinic to look in on Katie asleep in her bed (the one true innocent character who will be affected by this situation, whatever happens) and then finds Martin still awake and lying clothed on the bed waiting for her. Martin tells her that he still loves her, and we end on that hung moment of ambivalence of Julia still standing in her coat in the doorway of the bedroom, where things could go either way.
) decided to pass on The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, letting Channel 4 premiere them (along with repeating The Force Awakens) in 2022. And now years later ITV have belatedly premiered the last remaining Star Wars film on UK television with Solo. So it seems there has been quite a neat segregation (quarantine?) off between the Sequel series and the rest of Star Wars, at least in UK TV terms!
I suspect that a good proportion of these are more entertaining as a humerous-synopsis than they are to actually sit-through, although I was forced against my will this week by my partner to sit through a corker of a TVM on one of the streaming-services. It was called (I think?) Hot Frosty, about a lonely widow who is sold a magical scarf, only to drape it around a hilariously buff snowman. Naturally, he comes to life, and they fall in love, but only after he's proven himself in the kitchen, as a handyman and as an all-round real boy! Sadly, this being a family-friendly piece of tat, it is never implied if the widow also placed a generously-sized carrot somewhere about the snowman's person, but then I was raised on Viz magazine, so that's probably just where my mind automatically goes!