Sweet Substitute

Retitled as Caressed for distribution to the United States (with the addition of titillating nudity), Sweet Substitute comes from Canadian director Larry Kent, who was no stranger to courting controversy. His first film, The Bitter Ash, received severe backlash from censors and he made Sweet Substitute in 1964 as a follow-up that has a lighter story, but just as controversial in its frank depiction of sex and sexuality.

Tom (Bob Howay) is a bright student with a whole boring life planned ahead of him. He’s a shoo-in for a scholarship. He intends to become a high school teacher with a stay-at-home wife who will spend all of her time homemaking. For him, he sees that perfect wife in Elaine (Angela Gann). Even though he has no money of his own, no car, no job and is staying at home with his parents while he focuses on his studies, he buys her a ring. They have the whole thing planned out. After he finishes school, after they secure this, after they do that, they’ll get married.

The problem, you see, is that Tom is absolutely obsessed with sex. All he wants to do is get laid. It’s what he thinks about practically every waking minute of every day. Because of it, his studies are suffering, he might lose out on his coveted scholarship and then, poof, there go his dreams of being a teacher with a wife and four kids.

Elaine won’t put out. She’s a good girl. She wants to wait until marriage, and that won’t be for a few more years yet, with the courses at school that Tom has to complete before they get married. Kathy (Carol Pastinsky), has no such hangups. She’s a free spirit who wants to have a life, a career, and do it all after spending a year traveling abroad. He decides to stay, briefly, with her, to lose his virginity, to hopefully squash this obsession he has, and go right back to good girl Elaine so that they can begin their life together.

What winds up happening is far from what Tom imagines and it reveals a cruelty to himself he never thought possible. He’s not the nice guy he wants everyone to believe he is. He’s a shitty person who wants what he wants and will use threats of force to get what he wants. The ending of the film is in a happy moment, tinged with irony. The smiling couple, a freeze frame, that we all know is a bitter deception.

Sweet Substitute is a fascinating look at a convergence of film eras all happening at once. It’s reminiscent of those panicky 1950s exploitation movies, the short films you might see lampooned before the main feature in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It also has a handheld guerilla filmmaking aesthetic you might see in the nudie cutie, or roughie exploitation films of the era, from Doris Wishman or Roberta Findlay. But the odd thing about Sweet Substitute is that it’s not an exploitation film at all. It’s a pretty standard character-driven drama that just has a much more frank depiction of sexuality that non-exploitative features of the day rarely had. Filmmaking was changing, and before major films of the era shifted gears, we witnessed the first movements through independent filmmakers armed with low budgets, cameras and a whole lot of chutzpah. Later, major films would follow suit and we’d witness a complete change in what was considered acceptable for audiences of the cinema.

Sweet Substitute has a real-world grittiness that looks and feels like Scorsese’s freshman effort, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, and even set the stage for films that adopted a type of European neorealism in their narratives. It’s fascinating to witness these kinds of films and the impact that they had on the artform and the industry. The acting is good. The dialogue is good. The premise is intriguing. It’s interesting to see where the story goes, and the ending is a gut punch.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
Sweet Substitute comes to Blu-ray courtesy of OCN Distribution with a single Region-A locked Blu-ray disc that contains the film and special features, housed in a case with a reversible slipcover (one side is under its original title Sweet Substitute, the other side under its U.S. title of Caressed), and an in-depth booklet containing an interview with artist Sonja Arntzen, who designed the title sequence, and a comic reimagining of the film illustrated by Rick Trembles.

Sweet Substitute looks stellar with a 4K painstaking restoration (presented in 1080p on this disc) from a new scan of the original 16mm A/B camera negatives by Canadian International Pictures (CIP). On many of the special features, we see glimpses of what the film looked like pre-restoration and it looks predictably rough, with film splotches, dirt spots, general decomposition of the stock, etc. What we’re left with looks very, very nice. I can’t imagine the film looking much better than it does on this release. Nighttime scenes have inky black shadows and whites display a healthy amount of film grain.

Sweet Substitute was shot for a limited budget so it’s not perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. Its rough around the edges aesthetic suits it well and helps lend a certain authenticity to it, particularly in shots that were clearly taken without a permit, fast and furious, before the authorities showed up. They have a manic, high-energy vitality to them, contrasted with the quiet, steady shots inside.

Similar to the video presentation, the audio presentation of Sweet Substitute is very much a product of its time and result of its low budget. The mix here is in DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono, so it’s going to be a front-only presentation. The sound was transferred from the original 16mm magnetic final mix for this release.

Dialogue is always crisp, clear and favored, and never gets lost in a score that tends to go on and on and on. This movie has an omnipresent musical score that, while mixed well, can get a little distracting. The subwoofer loves the jazzy score’s LFEs, and they sound warm and rich, but… sometimes it might be nice to give it a bit of a rest. The dialogue does show signs that this was recorded on a lower budget as words with heavy “S” sounds hiss and Ps pop loudly with static. For what it is, and for what the movie is, the work that has gone into the audio mix on this disc is top-tier work.

Like the work that has gone into restoring the film and its audio mix for this Blu-ray release, the cultivation of special features is impressive. For existing fans, or for students of film who just want to learn more, there are a lot here to keep you busy for a long time:

• New Audio Commentary featuring Paul Corupe of Canuxploitation.com and film historian Jason Pichonsky
• Archival Audio Commentary featuring film professor David Douglas
• New Introduction to Sweet Substitute by Larry Kent (HD 1:04)
• Sweet and Sour (HD 10:17) – New interview with Kent
• Not Quite Liberated (HD 16:35) – New interview with Douglas
• New Audio Interview with actor Lanny Beckman (audio only, 5:31)
• The Caressed Cut (HD 5:59) – All the material added to the American release of Sweet Substitute, including the notorious striptease sequence
• Fantasia artist talk (HD 1:20:49) – Conversation with Kent moderated by Douglas
• Archival Audio Interview with Kent (audio only 10:37)
• Booklet featuring a new Motion Picture Purgatory comic strip by Rick Trembles and an interview with graphic artist Sonja Arntzen

Sweet Substitute is a groundbreaking film in a tremendous movement that helped redefine cinema as we know it, in a time when the world was changing in nearly every conceivable way. Sweet Substitute is about conservative characters coming to terms with their un-conservative yearnings and grappling with their emotional response to what they want, yet can’t consciously understand. OCN Distribution and Canadian International Pictures have put together a disc jam-packed with special features, and wonderfully restored audio/video to be able to enjoy this film in the best possible way. This release comes Highly Recommended, not just for the stellar work that went into its restoration, but for the in-depth examination on this curiosity of a cultural artifact.