Sugar (2004)

It's not for lack of material. Based on stories by Bruce LaBruce, Sugar charts an alliance between a middle-class boy and a teenage hustler that is wholly without precedent in mainstream cinema. That middle-class boy is Cliff (Andre Noble), a prototypically angsty gay teenager from a less-than-conventional Toronto household--unconventional enough for his hyperactive younger sister (Haylee Wanstall) to hand him a wad of birthday cash and tell him to go get some sex. Heading downtown, Cliff finds it in the figure of Butch ("Roswell"'s Brendan Fehr), a crack-smoking prostitute who introduces him to the demimonde of users and abusers populating this world. So with the tortured approval of his mother (Marnie McPhail), Cliff embarks on a picaresque journey with Butch, one that erases the line between a conventional teen coming-of-age and a more subversive challenge to what Cliff's world can look like.

Indeed, the film does a good job in this last regard, making it impossible to distinguish between the familiar pangs of restless youth and the plunge into the unknown that its protagonist makes. For Cliff, falling in love with Butch means much more than just giving in to youthful rebellion--it means opening himself up to people and places (and risks, and agonies) that his relatively sheltered existence would never allow. But lying immobile under the concept are the characters of Cliff and Butch, who don't come alive as people. The script is too opaque, never really explaining what draws the boys to each other or elucidating what they feel: they experiment with sex, make vulgar adolescent conversation, and drift through encounters with various tricks, but the attendant motives and emotions remain unclear. We wind up disconnected from the material.

In fact, most of the film's particulars are vague and noncommittal. Palmer's direction is borne of standard-issue Canadian indecisiveness, passively recording the events as they unfold and refusing to comment on the action through camera placement, montage, or any other means. While one can partially excuse this by noting the spare milieu in which Sugar walks, it still doesn't go the full way to explaining the namby-pamby technique on offer. Given this non-direction, it's no wonder that Noble and Fehr are at a loss to breathe life into their characters--nobody seems to have mapped out who they are, though one has to acknowledge that the two stars don't make nuanced performers, further dooming the production to fumbling inarticulacy. And yet, the potency of Sugar's concept manages to shine through in spots, giving a sense of the film that might have been. Perhaps cleverer talent can pick up its torch and run with it.