Well, what do you know, a couple of films this week which are both fairly idiosyncratic in their own way and have vaguely similar titles to boot, despite being products of rather different cultures and sensibilities. First up is Hilmar Oddsson's Travelling with Mum (in the original Icelandic; the English title is the somewhat more vernacular Driving Mum, which for me doesn't quite capture the essential strangeness at the heart of the film).

Somewhere in the rugged west of Iceland, in the far-off year of round about 1980, we find sixty-something recluse Jon Jonsson (Throstur Leo Gunnarsson) living in a modest dwelling with his mother (Kristbjorg Held). The two of them spend all the live-long day knitting, listening to cassette tapes of old news programmes, and continuing a non-stop low-level argument primarily concerned with what Jon's going to do when his mother eventually passes away.

This lifestyle of roaring excitement comes to an end when Jon's mother does actually die, having previously extracted a promise from him that he will ensure she is buried in her home town, off near distant Reykjavik. Jon turns out to be a dutiful son, although his arrangements to discharge his duties are rather eccentric: rather than do anything as elaborate as contacting a funeral director, his approach is to dress his mother's corpse in her Sunday best, do her hair and make-up (the results put one in mind of Heath Ledger as the Joker), stick her in the back of his semi-derelict Ford Cortina, and drive her down there himself, with the family dog Brezhnev also along for the ride.

Yup, we're off into what initially looks like offbeat black comedy-drama territory, with the dilapidated car trundling across the immense cosmic landscapes of Iceland and Jon managing to annoy or baffle most of the people he meets along the way. The tone is initially deadpan-comic, with German tourism and drunken karaoke viewed with a sardonic eye, but slowly the magical-realist element of the film starts to ramp up: his mum starts talking to him, as argumentative as ever, and he starts to see a woman from his past (Hera Hilmar) over and over again.

In the end this proves to be a character piece as much as a road movie, as the occasion of his mother's death leads to Jon confronting and beginning to resolve some of the disappointments of his life. It all turns out to be surprisingly poignant and moving (Throstur's performance contributes considerably to this), as well as occasionally funny and insightful. Some rather beautiful black and white cinematography also adds a lot to the experience of a film which is, at the very least, an accomplished example of its genre. Worth a look.

On to a film which there is an outside chance of someone actually watching, namely Ethan Coen's Drive-Away Dolls. This is essentially a stand-in title for the one that eventually appears on screen, which is potentially both provocative and actionable. The Coen brothers haven't made a film together in over five years, apparently because they just don't enjoy it any more, but this still shows strong signs of their usual sensibility even though Joel Coen isn't credited as having been involved. Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan play a couple of Philadelphia lesbians who, for no very well-explained reasons, end up on a road-trip to Tallahassee Florida, using a car they're meant to be delivering. Trouble ensues when it transpires that valuable property belonging to some bad guys is hidden in the car (there has been a mix-up). Sure enough they eventually discover they are transporting Pedro Pascal's severed head and a plaster model of Matt Damon's winky, and the question becomes more one of what to do with them� . .

So it's another road movie, sort of, although on this occasion cross-fertilised with a noirish caper, a gay romance and a sex comedy – this almost certainly isn't a film to watch with an elderly relative unless they are extremely broad-minded, as you may have gathered. (And if that wasn't bizarre enough, the film seems to have been inspired by the activities of a real-life artist known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, who is played in a cameo by Miley Cyrus.) Presumably it's the cachet attached to the Coen name that got Pascal and Damon on board, because this is a film that feels like it's camped out on the very edge of the mainstream.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, of course, and there are some elements of the film which are appropriately funny or touching – Beanie Feldstein is particularly good value as Qualley's ex, but not in the film quite enough. When the film is trying to be downbeat or naturalistic it's generally pretty good (ironically enough, given the sheer outrageousness of the plot), but the problem is that a lot of the time it feels like it's being deliberately over-the-top for ironic effect, in the same way that it knowingly toys with thriller conventions. Some of the characters are also quite a bit larger than life and, depending on the skill of the performers involved, this can get quite grating.

So in the end it's rather uneven but occasionally very entertaining; everyone involved in the film certainly appears to have been having fun with it. But, certainly for the first half hour or so, it's like watching a film which just isn't quite working – the jokes don't quite land, the performances are just a bit too big, the pace is a little too frantic, the tone's not quite consistent enough. Either the film recovers from all of this or I just got acclimatised to it after thirty minutes or so – I do recall a vague feeling of 'Oh, well, may as well just roll with it' somewhere in the middle. It's probably an odd choice for a 60-something man to make a film about a lesbian couple as his solo movie debut, the sort of thing one might expect grumbly think-pieces about, but Coen has apparently said he fancied doing a gay romance movie which wasn't about people coming out or getting murdered at the end, and this certainly succeeds at avoiding tropes and cliches. It doesn't feel exploitative, anyway, but I imagine there's a tricky balancing act involved in ensuring a film retains mainstream appeal while still feeling authentic to the LGBT experience. Drive-Away Dolls probably doesn't succeed at this any more than at all the various other things it's trying to be, but it's sporadically good enough and interesting enough to be a diverting way of passing 84 minutes.

Awix

25.03.24 Front Page

Back Issue Page