Sweet Talk centers on the main character of Delilah who is a sex hotline worker. This film is hard to sit through. Excuse the pun, but I am being completely honest here. Delilah is the typical cliché romance character with her love for Russian novels and everything dramatic. Her life seems somewhat routine and meaningless until she gets the phone call of a lifetime from a man named Samson. Yes, you read correctly, Samson. And Delilah. It's like I am being hit over the head with clichés throughout this movie. It is exhausting.
Most of the film consists of Samson and Delilah having imaginative phone conversations but never actually meeting. This idea that it is "sexy" and mysterious to have a fleeting romance over the phone is somewhat dated and even though our phones consume us, as a generation, it feels cheesy. Samson and Delilah take us on their own personal romantic fetishes that seem to only take place in Vienna and Budapest. Each of the fantasies is very Tolstoy in that they involve a Countess and a lowly born man falling in love. Delilah's fantasies are slightly more modern, being in the 1940s in Vienna with a nurse treating an invalid. She cures him; they have sex, end of story. Extremely predictable and not unlike a cheap romance novel. Something I find interesting is that in Delilah's imagination a strange, silent man would appear, and she would get scared, wanting him to leave. I was disappointed that the writers never expanded on why he was there or what made Delilah so afraid of him. That would have at least made the movie worth watching.
In terms of Samson's character, he is mostly predictable. They went with the cliché struggling writer who is desperately trying to find his next big muse or plot. It is curious that he carries a gun with him and it seems like, at first, that he is some sort of criminal, but really he just has it to pretend he is dangerous. I found that to be an interesting quirk, but the intrigue stopped there.
Sweet Talk is a film that is not at all sweet but filled with cheesy, greasy attempts at honest romance. Samson and Delilah end up taking the viewer on less of an adventure and more of an uninteresting trip overnight on a dirty couch and a grungy, old apartment.
*Sweet Talk is currently playing in select cities and is available on VOD.
