Christmas 2020 Reviews: Day 19 - A Sugar and Spice Holiday (2020)

A Sugar and Spice Holiday is the first Christmas film to star an Asian-American cast in the leading roles. It follows Jacky Lai as Suzy. When Suzy was little, she was very close with her grandmother, who she would make gingerbread houses with. While her grandmother loved the baking part of this, Suzy loved designing the houses.

Years later in the present day, Suzy has grown up and become a successful architect living in Los Angeles. She is up for a promotion, but has to compete for it against another colleague by completing building designs for a client. Whoever's designs the client chooses, is the person who will get the promotion. However, Suzy was supposed to be taking time off for Christmas, and so she takes her work with her, back to her childhood home in Maine.

There, she is reunited with her former high school crush, Billy (played by Tony Giroux), who encourages her to take part in a Christmas bake-off competition at their beloved local community centre. Suzy agrees to it, as her now deceased grandmother was a champion of this competition, and as a perfectionist, Suzy plans to make her proud. However, as she tries to balance her work, the competition and growing romance with Billy, things don't go quite as she had hoped...

After watching A Gingerbread Romance back on Day 4 of this Christmas collection, I was a bit hesitant to watch this film. I feared that, like in A Gingerbread Romance, the cast were people of colour just so that the filmmaking company could tick a box and satisfy a certain type of audience, without the characters reflecting anything about the race of the actors playing them. I am so delighted that this was not the case.

This film was so cute, I loved it.

Jacky Lai was an incredibly likeable leading lady, and I hope that she will be cast in more leading roles in the future. From what I can tell, she has generally only played side characters, which is a shame. She makes Suzy very appealing to watch, and is aided by the fact that her character, like most of the script, is well-written. Every time we are first introduced to a character who Suzy already knows, the film will freeze-frame on that character, and Suzy in voiceover will compare their personality to a baked good of some kind, with an photo of that food onscreen too. For example, when we are first introduced to Marshall, Suzy's rival for the promotion at their workplace, he's described as a sugar-free lemon square: "sour, sticky and made with artificial sweeteners". It's a creative way of helping the audience develop a quick understanding of who these characters are, but is particularly good for showing us Suzy's perception of others, and her world view. This is notable in that she has a consistent idea of what baked good everyone is, except when it comes to Billy, as her perception and food ideas change as she gets to know him again.

Tony Giroux as Billy was also utterly charming, and he shared great chemistry with Jacky Lai. The main cast is Chinese (Giroux is half-Chinese, as is his character) and it is so wonderful to see a Christmas film following a family who are a simply a kind of normal that the TV and film industries haven't made much of an effort to show us before. This film really felt like it was made with love and respect for these characters and their culture. No one was a caricature, they all felt like real people. They sat down and had a Christmas dinner, just with different food than Western culture deems "normal". There has been a lot of xenophobic behaviour towards Chinese people in response to the COVID-19 outbreak this year, and so I'm really glad that this film came out in 2020, to remind anyone who may need reminding that people are people.

I really liked Suzy's grandmother, and the relationship they had together, so I was sad that she wasn't in the film for very long, although her presence is still prominent for the rest of it.

Another character I really liked was Suzy's dad (played by Tzi Ma). He learned English by listening to Johnny Cash songs, so he speaks with a southern twang, and often dresses in cowboy style shirts like Cash would wear. He still has his own personality though, and is a very loving father when Suzy needs him, although he mostly stays quiet the rest of the time. It's a really well done, appealing character.

Unfortunately, I did have a couple of small problems with the film. Some of the attempts at humour were too childish in this otherwise respectable production, which is somewhat insulting to children. I'm mainly talking about the Dupont twins (played by Marc-Anthony Messiah and Sasha Hayden) who are in a rival baking group against Suzy and her team in the baking competition. These two are so over the top and immature in how they bicker with each other, and it just does not match the tone of the rest of the film at all.

There's also a plot point that involves Billy telling Suzy not to do something, only for her to do it and then get sad when he finds out and gets angry with her for going against his wishes. This whole storyline felt pointless and cliché, plus it was a rather weak way of setting these two characters up against each other.

However, this is such a delightful, feel-good Christmas film with a wonderfully likeable cast, you can easily forgive the few, minor flaws it does have. Although the script does feel formulaic and familiar in more ways than one, it does have some twists and turns that surprised me in a good way. I highly recommend you check out this film, and acquaint yourself with these enjoyable, heart-warming characters. I'm just sad that this is a made for TV production, that will probably be missed by a lot of people.

THE SCOREBOARD

Would I recommend this film? Yes

Christmas quote of the film: "Christmas is about community. It's about the people we love, and the places that make us feel home." - Suzy

Film rating: 7.5/10