Flasz On Film

“It’s the journey that matters, not the destination,” is what we keep telling ourselves to value process over outcomes. In the context of storytelling this truism holds especially well because as viewers, readers, or more generally, receivers of arts and entertainment, it is incumbent on us to remember to take into account the totality of the experience, as opposed to the acute emotional takeaway the ending left us with. This is something we keep muttering under our noses to remind ourselves not to dismiss a movie or a book based on how we felt when it ended because we are predisposed towards biasing for recency as opposed to optimizing for a holistic approach. We tend to over-index on things that irk and under-index on smaller positive aspects that might be otherwise compounding in the background. And it is our responsibility, especially when we are about to pass judgment on any work of art, to take all that into account and at least attempt to stay fair and consistent, even though the way the movie ends might still impact considerably on how we feel about it.

Which is what I kept telling myself on the way home after seeing Sunny Dancer, a seemingly feelgood indie directed and written by George Jacques (Black Dog) and starring Bella Ramsey and Neil Patrick Harris. I went into it completely blind and without any preconceived expectations only to find what unfolded as an experience you could see as a distant spiritual successor to movies like Little Miss Sunshine, The Spectacular Now and The Inbetweeners… up to a point. Jacques, who made this film at a young age of twenty-five, chose specifically not to sentimentalize the teenage experience or patronize his characters. Presumably thanks to the fact that the youth depicted on the screen was registered as fairly recent personal history for the filmmaker, the movie itself was immediately imbued with organic relatability: in Sunny Dancer young people talk like young people, fret over problems young people find important and the camera captures them without a pre-fitted filter. 

This is particularly where the movie was setting itself up for stunning success because this immediacy, believability of the teen-on-teen dynamic, and the overall authenticity of the experience was going to be layered over top of something more profound and solemn. Sunny Dancer isn’t just a movie about teens doing their thing, but rather about teens suffering from cancer or recovering from it who despite the fact that life had dealt them rough hand of cards are still pushing on with their lives and doing their thing. In fact, because they are acutely aware of their own mortality–some of them have already lost friends and brushed shoulders with finality–their desire to squeeze as much out of life as possible is amplified. But even this realization isn’t easy for them.

Ivy (Bella Ramsey), who is the protagonist of the film, doesn’t have that YOLO energy when we meet her. She hates the world for giving her cancer and others for not having to go through what she went through. Deep down, as we later find, she hates herself for surviving when countless others didn’t. When she is sent by her (absolutely overbearingly cringy) parents (Jessica Gunning and James Morton)–who in contrast to all the teen characters in the film are written with the subtlety of an aggravated elephant–to a summer camp for teen cancer survivors, she views it as nothing but punishment. But we all know, or at least we think we do, where this all would go. Ivy meets a bunch of friends who eventually crack open her hardened shell, falls in love and goes on to have a number of uplifting experiences any teenager who has been to summer camps would be able to recognize. Only the ones these kids have are rendered a tiny bit more intense because the kids themselves already appreciate life’s fleeting brevity much more than most. 

And this is where we run into problems. I hate to do this, especially midway through a text that begins like a review, but Sunny Dancer is only great up to a certain moment and I can’t just leave it off the page without feeling as though I was lying by omission. As I foreshadowed in the opening paragraph, there is a reason why I had to repeatedly tell myself that journey trumps destination because on one hand I couldn’t get enough of that innocent authenticity conjured by this movie seemingly without much effort, and on the other hand I felt betrayed by the way it chose to manipulate me towards the end. 

In a nutshell, there is only so much one can do to disguise their own lack of artistic maturity. Eventually, everyone trips over. Honestly, I should have anticipated that Sunny Dancer would eventually soil the bedsheets, especially after witnessing a throwaway scene in which Ivy and her group go AWOL from the camp and the movie cuts to a montage of subtly slowed down footage of them dancing, drinking and waving sparklers around–a classic trope found in Sundance indies directed by first-timers and coached by screenwriting workshop convention. Combine bokeh in the background, sparklers in the foreground, mild indie rock blaring through the speakers and you have a TIFF movie hat-trick. Principally, there’s nothing wrong about this either, but it telegraphs to the viewer who has seen enough movies that the director, in spite of whatever artistic maturity they might have otherwise smeared onto the film stock thus far, has still quite a lot to learn.

Even without the sparklers and the Sundance aesthetic it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where Sunny Dancer might go. Because stories need arcs and drama is typically conjured out of conflict, sudden reversal of fortune or arrival of unwelcome news, you can reasonably expect that Ivy’s rather linear character journey from being withdrawn and wrought with self-destructive thoughts to becoming someone who embraces life as it is and cherishes it in a canonically epicurean fashion would be eventually disrupted. In any teen dramedy you could expect a romantic relationship to turn sour, a friendship to fall apart or sexual initiation to become a source of trauma. Any of these would throw Ivy’s character development out of alignment and generate compelling dramatic friction. But Sunny Dancer is not a bog-standard teen dramedy despite its innate desires; it’s a teen dramedy about kids recovering from devastating medical conditions that oftentimes come back with a vengeance. Death is constantly present in their lives and the entire purpose of the camp is to give these kids a chance at a life that cancer desperately wanted to deny them. 

Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that not everyone is going to make it to the end credits. Which is exactly where Sunny Dancer makes what I can only refer to as a terrible storytelling decision. As we build a relationship with Ivy and her friends we also witness her strike up a relationship with Jake (Daniel Quinn-Toye), a quintessential lovable rogue. Their puppy love blossoms and warms the screen as the filmmaker gently orbits their emotional quantum state and captures what most of us can recall from the time we were their age. Then, Jake is briefly taken to a hospital which instils considerable anxiety both in Ivy and the audience… which is then quickly dispelled when Jake comes back and explains his absence to Ivy. This brief drama is resolved and the film resumes its progress towards the camp talent show where James Blunt himself makes an appearance and sings the only song he is known for. Everyone turns up to support Ivy who decided to perform, something you’d never assume she would do at the beginning of the film. She dances to Scissor Sisters “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’” and the combination of the song’s intrinsic four-on-the-floor disco vibe with Ivy’s unembarrassed emotional liberation forces the entire audience off their seats to participate in what looks like a cathartic shared experience. And then the filmmaker pulls the rug from under all of it. 

The camera cuts to Ivy, flanked by her parents, as she talks to the camp leader (Neil Patrick Harris) and the camp therapist (Shalom Brune-Franklin) about her experience at the camp. She’s changed, open, forward-looking and grateful for the experience she was allowed to have before her bubble (and the viewer’s as well) is popped by the revelation that her experience was only partially real. She did go to the camp. She met all those friends and she did fall in love with Jake. But Jake never came back from the hospital and the entire last act of the movie was half-hallucinated by an unreliable narrator whose mind couldn’t cope with the loss of a loved one and elected to pretend this tragedy never happened. What follows is a brief montage showing that scenes in which we saw Jake and Ivy together, only Ivy was present. We see her friends worry about her. We see her parents devastated. And we go back to that talent show where everyone turned up to support her. And all I can say is that the way this reversal of fortune was handled was far from optimal. Whatever uplifting energy this movie was charged with was drained immediately and despite the bittersweet ending credits with a comedic slant, it left me dazed. 

And I think there was a better way to tell the same story available to George Jacques, who clearly wanted to attempt a twist and separate himself from the lot by way of giving his movie a little tinge of that M. Night Shyamalan spice. What he accomplished was shock. His movie spent considerable time building a trust with the audience only to sever it abruptly and irreversibly. The only reason I could fathom was to bring the audience up close to death and recreate how suddenly your world might come crashing down, as if it wanted to imitate what it must be like to live Ivy’s life or to be a parent to a child suffering from cancer. You might have good and bad days. But one day, without warning, it might all end. And I appreciate the ambition this storytelling device had. 

At the same time, introducing this twist undermined what I saw as the primary mission of the film, which was to lift our spirits and dispel the notion that being a kid with cancer is a personality trait; to show that young people are strong and resilient enough to lead lives despite the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Thus, the idea of letting us believe that Jake came back only to reveal the truth in a sudden twist registered as unnecessarily cruel. And it didn’t have to end this way. 

I believe we could have been trusted with the truth. We could have been there with Ivy as she learned about Jake’s death and dug herself out of grief with the help of her friends who are there for her. It would have still come as a shock, but we’d be a part of this journey together with Ivy; we would have participated in processing this tragedy, which would have made the final talent show many times more cathartic than it was in the movie we actually saw instead. George Jacques didn’t give me time or the space to cry and process what happened during the film; he made me go home and do it on my own time, which forever tainted the experience. 

Jake’s death would have been shocking enough delivered straight. Turning it into an emotional plot twist was not only unnecessary but it also revealed that the filmmaker has yet to learn that making the audience sit with uncomfortable emotions is OK. Granted, Sunny Dancer would have looked more conventional that way. But I would argue that narrative novelty shouldn’t have been its objective in the first place. The movie thrives on the back of its character authenticity and the idea of reframing an experience by applying a relatable perspective to it. We didn’t need to turn it into The Sixth Sense at all. It was actually doing great as a hybrid of The Inbetweeners and Little Miss Sunshine. 

Alas, this story didn’t unfold in a way that it perhaps deserved. It did in a way that is much more likely to elicit a conversation online even though it undermined its own reason for being by doing so. Sure, it is acutely impactful, but so is a kick in the stomach. And being completely honest, Sunny Dancer was a story that required to pound the viewer in the gut at some point, but I think it would have been better off if it had let me recover from it while watching Ivy dance and cope with her grief in a lucid way, as opposed to knocking me out right before the credits rolled and leaving me rolling on the floor in the dark.   

And that, my dear reader, is how you turn a four-star movie into a three-star one.