Flora and Son

In which John Carney whispers sweet nothings.

Eve Hewson and Orén Kinlan in Flora and Son (image courtesy AppleTV+)

John Carney’s Once felt like a minor miracle when it came out almost twenty years ago. If you wanted to make a movie musical back in the Aughts, your two options were to make either a star-studded Broadway adaptation or an animated kids’ film. Once was neither: an affectionately scruffy romance about two average people who find that their partnership makes them capable of greater vulnerability and greater artistic daring than they thought possible for themselves alone. As a simple romance, it was stirring; as a portrait of the mutually reinforcing link between love and the creative process, it was extraordinary. You can watch Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglová start their impromptu jam session in a music store and understand why artistic inspiration is so often explained through the idea of divine intervention.

Carney went on to make a second film in a similar vein, 2016’s pleasant Sing Street, and he goes for the hat trick with his latest film, Flora and Son. Flora and Son shares many elements with those two earlier films: working-class Irish protagonists, heartaches transmuted into art, emotional connections forged through the alchemy of songwriting. Here, the central character is Flora (Eve Hewson), who wants a better relationship with her teenage son (Orén Kinlan) and a way to express difficult-to-articulate desires for companionship and self-realization. She finds an avenue for meeting both needs when she rescues a guitar from the dump and enlists a soulful American, Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), to teach her to play it over Zoom lessons. 

Carney is as adept as ever at dramatizing the magic that can manifest itself in artistic inspiration and collaboration, during which two hearts can find the same harmony as a pair of plucked guitar strings. The Flora who initially sets out to write songs with her tutor and, later, with her son is not the same as the Flora who emerges on the other end of those creative processes. Carney writes and shoots these scenes with great sensitivity to the way that individuals play notes, notes merge into chords, and chords give way to melody and lyrics. A typical shot initially establishes Flora and Jeff as separated by geographical distance and a laptop screen; when they begin to play together, Carney moves the camera to focus on Flora, then moves it back without cutting to show Jeff now physically sitting near her. Music, for Carney, has the mysterious power to erase physical and emotional distance, conjuring intimacy out of thin air.

Unfortunately for him, this artistic prestidigitation doesn’t always work as smoothly in filmmaking than it does in music-making. Once and Sing Street are similarly starry-eyed about the power of a good song, but crucially, those films pair such sentiments with poignant depictions of the friction between romance and reality. Once’s protagonists do not receive a fairy-tale ending; the adolescent dreams of Sing Street are juxtaposed with imagery and subplots underscoring the fact that not all dreams come true. For all its surface-level portrayals of working-class Irish life, Flora and Son is much more of a fantasy. The material with which Carney’s script stitches together the songwriting scenes is thin, with conflicts and obstacles so insubstantial that they come across as mere pantomimes of actual problems. One character ends up in prison at the beginning of the third act, but the film treats the event as a mild inconvenience, dispensed with in two dialogue scenes and a montage. 

It’s not necessary, of course, for a fantasy to offer a Ken Loach–style portrayal of societal hardships, but Flora and Son lacks the clarity that even simple stories require in order to work. Even Disney princesses get an “I want” song to elucidate their stories’ stakes. Flora is hazily written, though, as if Carney can’t make up his mind about who she is. Flora wants many things—to find love, to find her creative voice, to be a better mother, to reconcile with her estranged husband, to make up for the time she lost as a result of having a child so young—but the intersections and tensions among these desires are so vaguely sketched that Flora seems confused rather than conflicted. Previous Carney protagonists yearned for certain things, but what does Flora yearn for? The answer to that question is as unclear at the film’s ostensibly joyous climax as it is at the beginning. Something has changed for Flora, but as Carney’s camera floats away from her and over the Dublin rooftops, its weightlessness unintentionally highlights how nebulous that change is. —Kevin McLenithan

★★☆☆

Flora and Son is currently in limited theatrical release and streaming on AppleTV+.

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Foe

The best parts of Foe read like nightmares. The worst parts are the moments when the film tries to explain them. When an unexpected guest arrives, late at night, at the farmhouse where Hen (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal) live, the married couple are suspicious and defensive, wary of Terrance (Aaron Pierre) and a proposal he brings with him that means a change for their relationship. Their unease stretches backward into the earlier days of their marriage, which has been unhappy. Ronan and Mescal use Midwestern accents rather than their native Irish lilts, lending an already stagey screenplay an even more clipped tone. This fits the film’s soft-science-fiction setting: Hen and Junior live in a world where a select few can go to space, but the dream of artificial intelligence has become a reality and a conduit to explore the ways in which we construct images of others that cannot possibly reflect their entire selves. Hen and Junior must reckon with their relationship with only Terrance and the drought-baked farmland around them for company. As Terrance pokes at wounds the two would rather not acknowledge, the setting casts the couple’s alienation in stunning naturalistic light. Like the marriage around which it’s built, Foe is shot through with jagged edges. When the film sits in the discomfort without explaining any of it, it works. Unfortunately, the explanations are obvious, and they raise more questions than they can satisfy. —Sarah Welch-Larson

★★☆☆

Foe is in limited release.