The Last Journey review — this Swedish documentary will make you weep
This profoundly lovely Swedish documentary is a crowd-pleasing road movie that hides a feral heart. Slickly shot, it's an often bleakly funny account of a last-ditch drive from central Sweden to southern France by the TV host Filip Hammar and his ailing 80-year-old father, Lars. Filip is retracing the beloved holiday trips of his childhood in an attempt to jog Lars, a former French teacher and committed Francophile, out of his incipient physical and cognitive decline. Along for the ride is Filip's fellow Swedish TV personality Fredrik Wikingsson, who invests the project with the kind of larky bromantic air (think early Judd Apatow) that's made it the highest-grossing Swedish documentary in history.
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That's the commercial. The reality is thornier. For every glossy drone shot of the three principals whizzing through the French countryside in a vintage Renault 4, there is a growing suggestion that Filip's mission to 'rejuvenate' his father is one of juvenile denial. Lars speaks in a whisper and can't eat, drink, walk or bathe without help. He falls and is hospitalised early on. His memory is fading. And though he is still moved by French culture, and by the songs of the Belgian Jacques Brel, he often appears on camera as a frozen soul who is fastened, in the uncompromising words of WB Yeats, 'to a dying animal'.
The film, co-directed by Hammar and Wikingsson, eventually acknowledges this and captures a fiercely sad conversation in which Lars says to his son, with poetic clarity, 'I hope you're not disappointed in me, Filip. Because I'm not the same any more. It's just that time has passed.'
And speaking of weeping … sweet Lord! The film builds to the kind of devastating sequence that doesn't just gently jerk some tears but grabs them and yanks them out relentlessly until you've collapsed in a heap on the floor, wailing, 'No more! No more! Jag alskar dig, Lars! Jag alskar dig!'★★★★☆
PG, 95min
In cinemas from Jun 20
Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman each Wednesday. Visit thetimes.com/timesplus to find out more.
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