Seattle is one of the largest and most populous cities in the United States. It is a center of technology, culture and industry, and its massive port opens it up to the world. But in “Sweetheart Deal,” a new documentary by Elisa Levine and the late Gabriel Miller, all of Seattle is reduced to a wide strip of road — Aurora Avenue — lined with cheap motels, fast food and tire shops. The rest of Seattle, with all its diversity and abundance, doesn’t exist at all in Aurora (except for the fact that Seattle’s economy also drives Aurora). In Aurora, women work the strip, negotiating prices with drivers peering out of expensive cars. All of this is captured by Levine and Miller with unflinching clarity.
It took Levine and Miller years to make the film. They found four “subjects”—Kristine, Krista, Tammy, Sara—all prostitutes and heroin addicts. They “play prostitutes” (in their words) to feed the addiction. “Vicious” doesn’t even come close to describing the cycle. It’s obvious that Levine and Miller had to establish a relationship of trust with people to allow themselves to be “seen” in this way and thus integrate into the world of Aurora Avenue. An obvious precedent was set by Mary Ellen Mark, whose groundbreaking “Streetwise” (the book and the documentary) depicted the lives of Seattle’s street children. These abandoned and runaway children clearly trusted Mark to an almost shocking degree, and a film like “Streetwise”—or “Sweetheart Deal”—is as much about the filmmaker as it is the subject. How on earth did Levine and Miller manage to get these women to trust them so deeply?
One of the “gateways” to Aurora Avenue is a character who calls himself “The Mayor of Aurora.” This is Laughn Doescher (aka “Elliott”), who was first seen feeding pigeons outside his trailer parked on Aurora Avenue. Elliott knows everyone on the street. He opens his trailer to women who need to come inside to get out of the cold, take a nap, and get something to eat. These women depend on Elliott for shelter, and he provides them with a quiet respite with (seemingly) no strings attached.
The stories of the four women profiled are diverse, but also distressingly similar. Tammy’s parents are devastated by what she’s doing, and yet they beg her for money to buy cigarettes. They rely on her “paycheck.” Kristina was a welder and loved it, but her addiction prevented her from continuing to work. She says the only thing that makes “prostitution tolerable” is heroin. She has an aggressive personality. Krista (whose street name is “Amy”) comes from a middle-class home, and her smiling sorority photos don’t tell the whole story. She turned to sex work to feed the addiction. Amy occasionally goes home to get clean under her mother’s care (many of the women no longer have a home to go to), but heroin has its grip on her. Sarah lost custody of her children. She keeps trying to quit drugs so she can get her children back, but the “drug disease” weakens her. Watching her negotiate with a client in a dreary motel room is depressing and infuriating. This woman belongs in a hospital.
Elliott’s intersections with these women become more complex as the film progresses. They trust him. He helps them. Yet Tammy has the mental clarity to keep her distance. She’s Elliott’s friend, but on his terms. She’s tough and knows how to behave. Amy doesn’t know how to behave at all.
“Sweetheart Deal” was filmed over a period of about ten years. Many events happened in those years, one of which made national news. These new revelations come about an hour into the film, and everything seen up to that point must be re-evaluated. The audience goes through the same process as the women. The curtain is pulled back. There are plenty of documentaries in which real-life events veer unpredictably outside the scope of the original project – films like Gimme Shelter, Capturing The Friedmans or Daughter From Danang. “Sweetheart Deal” has a lot in common with these films. Watching it is like being trapped in a nightmare and finally waking up. The truth is almost too horrible to bear when it comes out, but it’s better than living a lie.
Gabriel Miller’s cinematography is melancholic, poetic and sad. Shadows and rain-soaked sidewalks blur into neon, which then gives way to shoddy fluorescent lighting, evoking the garish, somber atmosphere of Aurora. The images of these four women are very intimate. They allow us to enter their lives, to see them at their worst. The film is handled with such sensitivity that it never feels exploitative.
Sherlock Holmes comes up a couple of times as a reference point. Elliott has a special fondness for the character, and at one point compares himself to Sherlock. There’s a scene where a drug-addicted Sarah lies down in the back of the camper van and Elliott puts a Sherlock DVD on for her to watch. It takes talented filmmakers to weave those random references, gathered over ten years, into a motif or at least a potential theme. Sherlock Holmes solved his crimes through a process of inference, using information visible to the naked eye and piecing together clues based on what’s already blindingly obvious. “Sweetheart Deal” works the same way.
In “Sweetheart Deal,” the detective’s magnifying glass isn’t necessary. The clues are there from the beginning, hidden in plain sight. “Sweetheart Deal” doesn’t beat around the bush. The life depicted is too stormy to be given a positive spin. But, in the same way that “Tiny” emerged as the “star” of “Streetwise” (so much so that people still pursue her 40 years later), Kristina, Krista, Tammy and Sarah take on such three-dimensional weight once you meet them, you’ll never forget them.