In Elwood Perez's Sugar Daddy (Regal Films, Inc., 1977), irony, altruism, instantaneous blindness, overt sexuality and modernist interior design are all ladled onto the narrative frame without so much as the whisper of a suspicion that the whole enterprise ought to collapse even without the added weight of Perez's skepticism. Of course, Perez’s melodramas are far too rigorous and tightly wound even when his subject matter occasionally approaches emotional recklessness of a comparable magnitude. Perez’s specialty was chronicling with a merciless analytical bent (good humor? bad faith?) the mechanics of a soap opera. It becomes a cliché to celebrate Perez for his ruthless take on social mores and to overcompensate for deconstructing not only those behavioral habits but also how pop culture reflects and feeds them.
Perez accentuates all the aspects that shouldn’t work, incidental coincidences, irrational decisions, sermons of nebulous denomination. His commitment to the ridiculous is what finesses that irony, but it’s not a safe irony. Sugar Daddy is a much more mysterious beast, one that doesn’t work without a belief in Perez’s form. A central aesthetic of Perez’s work is that the stories he has to tell are always (and knowingly) complicated by the ways he tells them. In particular, they emerge through the dichotomy he’s able to create between their visual design and the characters’ understanding of their circumstances. Sugar Daddy perfectly illustrates this. While its surface might suggest a ferociously straight face, they also point to other ways of understanding the drama unspooling before our eyes. And they achieve a moving balance between an empathy for the plight of the characters. Ricky Belmonte’s powerful contribution is often undervalued, as is Alma Moreno’s performance and the ironic distance which allows us to see them all in a different light.