Sweet as Maple Syrup (2021)

(On TV, August 2022) As much as I have a high tolerance for made-for-TV romantic comedies set in the world of food, there’s something about Sweet as Maple Syrup that just rubbed me wrong. I strongly suspect that knowing more than the average squirrel about maple syrup production doesn’t help—as a French Canadian not too removed from le terroir, I have spent some time in maple syrup cabanes, and absorbed the basics of how it’s made. To say that the film has a moronic take on it is putting it mildly. But what could have been tolerable with a decent script is made much worse by the way the film goes about its romantic comedy business. OK, the basics: A woman who has recently taken on her parents’ maple syrup production facility becomes increasingly concerned when the spring maple sap doesn’t flow, and asks a visiting arboriculturist for help. Now—anyone who has even looked at a maple tree knows that weather is the single biggest determinant of maple sap production: if it’s freezing at night and above freezing during the day, the sap moves around and that’s how you get the maple water that you collect and boil into syrup. But in this film, the characters scratch their heads and wonder if nutrients, speaking softly to the tree or whatever mumbo-jumbo is to blame. Weather is never mentioned. Now, this would be completely irrelevant to the success for the film if it had something else going for it. But even when it comes to its basic structural building blocks, Sweet as Maple Syrup (which was, ironically, produced in Quebec by noted director Caroline Labrèche) falls flat. The male lead character claims to be able to help despite having never seen a maple tree before (he’s from Arizona and should have stayed there), and more horrifyingly despite liking table syrup better than maple syrup. With such a Sirop de poteau-loving psychopath in the lead, the film doesn’t have a chance, especially when it mishandles the usual plot progression of such romantic comedies. The characters are all painfully stupid—there’s a bit where the protagonist should understand what happened to the night’s sap and she just painfully panics even as viewers can guess what’s about to happen next. There’s something about familiarity breeding contempt, and Sweet as Maple Syrup certainly invites the expression: the technical details about maple syrup production are the most visible blunders of the film, but they help sink something that wasn’t any good to begin with.