By Jake Wilson
THE LAST JOURNEY ★★★
(M) 95 minutes
There’s a strong chance anyone who has dealt with elderly parents will be entertained and moved by the Swedish documentary The Last Journey – though you might also be disconcerted by how relentlessly it pushes your buttons.
Filip Hammar (left) and his father Lars in The Last Journey.
The stars and co-directors Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson are known in their homeland as “Filip och Fredrik”, an enduring TV comedy duo like Hamish and Andy who have done game shows, prank shows and so on. In their 20s, they could have passed for boy band members, but these days, there’s nothing obviously showbizzy about them. Their humour is the dry, laconic kind, their manner that of professionals who know how to get the job done.
The joke here is in the way they apply their pragmatic approach to an unusually sensitive task. Filip’s retired dad, Lars, has lost his zest for life, and is getting physically frail – so the pair decide to take him on a road trip to help him regain his mojo.
So they head off to the south of France, where the Hammar family used to holiday in Filip’s childhood (his mother Tiina is still around and still married to Lars, but stays home in Stockholm while supporting the expedition from a distance).
Swedish TV presenters Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson push the car they drove to France with Filip’s father Lars (inside).
The choice of destination has an additional significance for Lars, who spent most of his adult life as a high-school French teacher: while he hasn’t been abroad in a while, the France of his imagination remains the place where they understand what the art of living is all about.
All very sweet, but The Last Journey also has a bit of an edge to it. Though its spirit is essentially benign, portions of it recall the elaborate stunts staged by Canadian comic Nathan Fielder in his US TV show The Rehearsal – or even the conceptual mindset of Filip and Fredric’s fellow Scandinavian auteur Lars von Trier.
It’s not enough that the journey follows the same route as the roadtrips Filip recalls from the 1970s: he has to acquire a duplicate of the old family car, an orange Renault, even if it’s barely roadworthy.
The boys go to comparable lengths in other respects, successfully or otherwise. A visit to Brussels in tribute to Lars’ favourite singer, Jacques Brel, is a winner, but their efforts to set him up to tell an amusing anecdote fall comically flat.
As practised entertainers, Filip and Fredrik have a manipulative streak that can verge on callousness, as it needs to: if they weren’t willing to go a bit too far, they wouldn’t get laughs. While Lars has too much life in him to be reduced to a mere prop, he’s also not strictly aware of everything happening around him, or so we assume.
Much of the action is clearly staged in one sense or another, openly or less so. But all of it rests on the palpable truth that this guy is no actor, and his reactions in the moment are the real deal, both his habitual crankiness and less frequent delight.
The film is also bluntly sentimental, especially at the climax (I could have done with less of Christian Olsson’s soaring score). The flippancy and the sentiment are two sides of the same coin: at worst they cancel each other out, at best the combination reflects the complicated mix of feelings middle-aged adults are liable to have about their living parents.
As Filip has acknowledged, the film is really much more about him than it is about his dad. But for all its ruthless efficiency, I never doubted that it was also an expression of love.
The Last Journey is released in cinemas on February 27.
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