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Swedish readers will already know all about The Last Journey, which in 2024 became the most successful documentary in the country’s history. They will also be acquainted with co-directors and stars Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson, nationally famous as media personalities Filip och Fredrik.
Prior knowledge may help with a film whose tone could otherwise baffle. The movie is a crowd-pleasing record of a father-son relationship in the shadow of old age, made with a large gloop of sentiment and the pranky comic energy of Saturday night TV.
The third star is Lars Hammar, Filip Hammar’s 80-year-old father, and the lost hero of a Proustian novel. Home movie footage from 2008 shows a school teacher in provincial Köping with a love of French culture, retiring at last. But la troisième âge proves a let-down. His days end up drifting by in a fug of gloom. And so his son conceives a plan to restore his brio: a road trip to Beaulieu-sur-Mer in the south of France, retracing the 1980s holidays the family once enjoyed.
A clue to the nature of the project is that the journey is made in a vintage tin-can Renault 4. And the old days are only relived up to a point. Filip’s mother stays in Sweden, replaced in the car by Wikingsson, the two younger men staging elaborate re-enactments.
The weight of contrivance can feel very weird. How much of what we’re watching was really ever for the benefit of Lars, and how much us, the audience? Still, the older Hammar is given at least one late-life moment it is hard to not to be touched by. And the film can have a real honesty about the melancholy stuff of getting old — however old you are.
★★★☆☆
In UK cinemas from June 20