The Last Journey: behind the scenes of the feel-good film of the summer

Telegraph

6 hours ago

When Filip Hammar was growing up in Köping, a Swedish town less than two hours' drive from Stockholm, his father Lars's obsession with France was an acute source of embarrassment. 'It was a very working-class town – they manufacture Volvo cars there – and this guy is sitting round wearing a beret,' recalls 50-year-old Hammar, who, with his friend Fredrik Wikingsson, 51, is one half of Sweden's best-known double-act, presenters of TV documentaries, quiz shows and podcasts. 'Now, I look back and think, 'Wow, that took a lot of courage!''
Every summer throughout Filip's childhood, Lars, a school teacher, would drive the family in his orange Renault 4 to Beaulieu-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, a journey of 1,450 miles. 'He was such a Francophile that when France did nuclear tests in Polynesia in the 1980s, the local newspaper called and asked if he was going to stop teaching French and drinking French wine.'
In 2008, after 40 years of teaching, Lars retired, aged 66. He had been looking forward to this new phase of life: he and his wife, Tiina, could now travel to France as often as they wished; it would be his troisième âge. It didn't turn out that way. Without his job, Lars lost his spark; the school had been his stage, and the performance was over. Although medical tests found nothing wrong physically, he took to spending his days slumped in his armchair, as if waiting for the end to come. Something had to be done.
So Filip came up with a plan, a road trip to reinvigorate his father, destination: Beaulieu-sur-Mer. He tracked down a vintage Renault, identical to the old family car, and roped in Fredrik – as well as a tiny film crew, so that the nostalgic journey could be documented. Lars, then aged 80 and armed with a French dictionary and a big fat book about Charles de Gaulle, was installed in the passenger seat, with Filip taking the wheel, and long-­legged Fredrik crammed into the back seat, and off they went.
When the film of their adventure, The Last Journey, was released in Sweden last year, it quickly became Scandinavia's highest-grossing ­documentary of all time. Now, this funny, life-affirming film is ­coming to British cinemas, which is how I come to find myself in ­London's Soho Hotel, asking Filip and ­Fredrik how Lars is handling his late-life fame.
'He said, 'I wish I was a little bit younger, a bit less frail, so I could enjoy the success more,'' replies Filip. 'But he gets so many lovely ­letters and emails from people who've seen the film, and Facebook messages from ex-students. I think he loves it.'
There were points in the filming when this happy ending seemed far from assured. Only a couple of days into the journey, in Malmö, Lars fell, cracking a bone in his leg and requiring hospitalisation: it looked as if the whole trip was off. Instead, Filip and Fredrik decided to drive the ancient Renault ('Europe's most overtaken car', as Fredrik calls it) across Denmark, Germany and ­Belgium, where they were ­reunited with Lars, who had travelled there by train with Tiina, after being discharged from hospital.
The documentary captures the playful, staged moment when the two friends plant Lars behind the wheel and push the Renault 4 over the border into France, a smile of sheer delight breaking across his face. His troisième âge had begun.
'Conventionally, you're not supposed to stage stuff in a documentary,' says Filip, who resists the idea that non-fiction films should maintain a po-faced, unmanipulated, 'fly-on-the-wall aesthetic'. Fredrik tells a story about the great German director Werner Herzog giving a talk to a class of film students. After one of them asked him if he'd ever staged something in any of his docu­mentaries, 'Herzog said, '­Everyone who thinks a documentary needs to be straight up and fly-on-the-wall, raise your hand.' And everybody raised their hands. Then he said, 'Happy New Year, losers!' and left the room.'
In The Last Journey, we see Filip ask his father what he used to love most about France. Lars thinks for a minute. 'It was great to meet ­peo­­ple who don't stop at stop signs,' he says. 'Every Frenchman is his own president.'
He also mentions that he used to enjoy seeing how the French would argue in traffic, which prompts Fred­rik to visit a local casting agency, hire a couple of actors and stage a minor road-rage incident for the unwitting Lars. The following day, Filip takes his father to a roadside café for lunch, while Fredrik hides around the corner, directing proceedings via a walkie-talkie. ('Car number one – go! Car number two – go!') One of the actors pulls up in front of the café, blocking the road with his car; when a second actor drives up, an argument breaks out that ends with someone getting slapped. Lars watches, entranced, mouth slightly open, from his ringside seat at the café.
I ask Fredrik when they broke it to Lars that the whole scene had been orchestrated. 'He was at a screen­ing, two weeks before the premiere,' he says, 'and I suddenly realised we'd forgotten to tell him. When he was watching it and realised it was a set-up, he just turned to me with a lovely smile and said, 'You bastards.'' Filip laughs. 'He's always been a good sport.'
The French trip functions as what Fredrik calls a sort of 'reverse bucket list' for Lars; repeating the same experiences he'd already ticked off decades before. They stay in the apartment where the family always used to go, enjoying the same old view from its balcony, and take trips to all the familiar haunts: the cemetery at Sète where Lars's hero the singer-songwriter Georges Bras­sens is buried; the beach; the market; the posh restaurants, where Filip now has to help his frail father keep the food on his fork and raise his wine glass high enough to swallow.
'And, in the editing, we realised that these almost desperate attempts to recreate the past also said so much about what Filip wants out of this,' says Fredrik. 'It's a metaphor for what he is trying to do, to recreate what was before.'
And this is perhaps the film's most poignant aspect: Filip's desperation for his elderly father to enjoy life as he used to causes Lars in turn to feel sad that he is no longer living up to his son's expectations, that he is somehow disappointing him. It is Filip, it seems, who is in denial about ageing, not Lars. That realisation lands with unexpected emotional force.
The process of making The Last Journey also led Filip to question his father's long-held view of France. While the country was always a source of happiness for Lars, 'I some­times think, does France deserve all this love? We screened the film in Paris the other night, and it went down well, but to the French, it's like, 'You don't have to tell us that our country's great; we know!' I love France, but I also detest that self-congratulatory aura that almost every Frenchman has.'
'They take it for granted,' adds Fredrik, before admitting, slightly sheepishly, that he owns a second home in France. 'I love the weather, but the people..? The local baker treats me like s--- every morning.'
The Last Journey is not the first time that Filip has turned the camera on his family. In 2007, he and Fredrik made an acclaimed series about Filip's sister Linda, who has a learning disability: I en annan del av Köping (In another part of Köping), which ran for four seasons. 'She was living in a home with three male friends, also learning dis­abled, and when you hung out with them, they were so funny, it was almost like Seinfeld,' Filip tells me. 'The first episode opened with her saying, 'Uh-oh, I've been unfaithful again...' and that set the tone for the series. It was not what people would expect.' The show was so popular that, for a while, Linda became a national celebrity. 'At one point, she was voted 'Woman of the Year' in Sweden. Ahead of the queen!
'For some reason, I tend to explore my family and my hometown in our work – it must be a kind of therapy, or a way of dealing with weirdness,' he says. 'But I have said to Fred, 'By the way, whenever you want to do something about your family, I would be open to that...''
'They're not charismatic enough!' replies Fredrik. 'That's the harsh truth. They're so low-key.'
'But there is a sort of inverted ­char­isma vibe to your parents,' says Filip, kindly. 'You'd have to dig really, really deep,' concedes Fredrik.
When The Last Journey came out in Scandinavia, the scale of its ­suc­­cess took both men by surprise. 'It had more admissions than Dune: Part Two, which had a huge marketing budget,' points out Fredrik. 'God, we're so boastful. There have been several successful doc­u­mentaries in Sweden in recent years: one about the ex-prime minister Olof Palme; one about Ingrid Bergman; one about the footballer Zlatan Ibra­him­ović. And one is about a teacher from a small town: my dad. He beat them all.'