The flighty mindset of hyper-online dwelling proves an uneasy resolution to the tough gravity examine of small-town poverty in “Sugar Babies,” Rachel Fleit‘s documentary portrait of younger, hard-up Louisiana girls getting by on their wits, wiles and closely TikTok-filtered faces. A working-class faculty pupil in her early twenties with desires to chase and costs to pay, Autumn Johnson refers to herself as “a sugar child with out the sugar”: Trawling courting websites and social media platforms for moneyed males searching for some digital flirtation, she plies them for cash in alternate for texts and pictures, all with out ever assembly in particular person. It’s a dwelling, or at the least it appears to be. Beguiled by Autumn’s drive of persona, Fleit’s movie zeroes in on her and her genial circle, however is sketchier on the social and monetary realities of the phenomenon for which it’s titled.
Pitched uncertainly between intimate nonfiction character research and an extended journalistic view, “Sugar Infants” is understandably compelled by Autumn as a human topic. By turns humorous, bratty and all too susceptible, she’s a poignant consultant of a era — of girls, specifically — thwarted by a stagnant financial system in a state the place the paltry minimal wage of $7.25/h hasn’t been raised since 2008, and whereas her resolution to the disaster could strike many viewers as ill-advised, she doesn’t need for initiative. Whereas duly aware of mitigating components, the movie winds up softballing Autumn and her cohorts, avoiding laborious and even straightforwardly context-setting questions whereas prioritizing their standpoint.
The outcome, not not like Autumn herself, is stressed and erratic, typically partaking however typically adrift. That’s a disappointment from Fleit, whose 2023 doc “Bama Rush” was a extra dynamic smartphone snapshot of Gen-Z womanhood, and whose 2021 movie “Introducing, Selma Blair” largely averted the tasteless pitfalls of movie star portraiture. Given the hooky material promised by its title, although typically put aside for extra common slice-of-life remark, “Sugar Infants” could discover additional docfest slots to observe its competitors premiere at Sundance, however feels too slender and discursive for vital publicity past the competition circuit.
“I wanna be capable to say I did stuff,” says Autumn on the outset of the movie in 2021, as she fantasizes a couple of future life far past the confines of Ruston, Louisiana. Her drab hometown — a spot, in her phrases, “the place you may’t earn cash” — is extra run-down than common within the midst of the COVID pandemic, which has additionally price Autumn her waitressing job. Although she’s the primary in her household to go to school, grade slippage within the wake of a private funk has stripped her of her scholarship. Needing 1000’s of {dollars} for charges, she’s found she has a knack for flirting with males on-line and persuading them to pay her to maintain the strictly screen-based rapport going. Whereas maintaining dozens of those cyber sugar daddies candy, she generates additional earnings by charging different younger girls for TikTok tutorials on this explicit artwork of seduction.
It’s a ploy seemingly profitable sufficient that Autumn’s pregnant finest buddy Bonnie and youthful sister Hailey additionally get in on the act — although Hailey prefers to rip-off her iPhone suitors by demanding cash for pictures that she by no means delivers, seemingly with out unfavorable penalties. “The one manner for ladies to make a change is to make use of these males which have the cash and take management, to grow to be the wealthy,” Hailey says.
It’s a humorous line that warrants extra interrogation than the movie pursues, because the practicalities of the sugar-baby racket grow to be more and more blurry. We get little sense of how a lot cash the ladies are making from it (although they at all times appear strapped for money), what it prices them in time and psychological labor, and even how the interactions are inclined to proceed, as Fleit evokes Autumn’s on-line dealings not with screenshots however atmospherically woozy selfie montages. A later reveal that Autumn has reneged on her coverage to not meet shoppers in particular person is confusingly botched: The build-up to 1 rendezvous is doomily portrayed, although the result is rarely specified.
The movie’s four-year timeline, too, is oddly amorphous: Although there’s intensive, cheerfully ambient footage of Autumn hanging out together with her household, mates and on-off boyfriend Mighty, key adjustments of location and circumstance are extra abruptly introduced. Mighty is a heat and infrequently perceptive determine who presents extra perception on the social tensions and fault traces in Ruston than anybody else within the movie. Autumn’s admission that she feels appeared down on by wealthier white college students in school for being “ghetto” or “ratchet” is one other instance of an announcement that Fleit lets lie, somewhat than pushing for a extra revealing elaboration.
Sociopolitical context, in the meantime, is delivered through jarring insertions of stark factual title playing cards and newscast footage concerning former Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards’ repeatedly thwarted efforts to boost the minimal wage — a topic that Autumn herself by no means discusses immediately, even because it defines her plight. With such sudden switches to a macroscopic lens, “Sugar Infants” dangers speaking over the younger girls to whom it in any other case lends such a sympathetic ear.
