Driving Mum
Hilmar Oddsson’s deadpan Icelandic comedy-drama could hardly be a more offbeat road movie.
Hilmar Oddsson was born in Reykjavík in 1957 and is a musician in addition to being a filmmaker who often writes his own screenplays. He has been directing films since 1986 but Driving Mum represents the first time that I have come across his work. Consequently, I cannot say how characteristic a piece this is but it is certainly possessed of a very individual voice albeit that the film contains echoes of other works of deadpan comedy. Indeed, the film’s opening scenes immediately prompt thoughts of the tone favoured by Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki. Here we meet Jón Jonsson (Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson) a middle-aged bachelor who still lives with his mother (Kristbjörg Kjeld) in a remote setting in the Westfjords of Iceland. They sit side-by-side knitting and, in the absence of any television set, they listen not to a radio but to cassettes which bizarrely incorporate weather forecasts and the like. When a cassette has run to its close it is mother, the dominating figure, who demandingly turns to Jón: “Change cassettes”. We soon discover that the two of them knit sweaters which they then sell by passing them to a boatman who in exchange brings them fresh cassettes.
If this is already a decidedly offbeat situation, Oddsson accentuates it further by choosing to convey the sense of the spaciousness of Iceland by filming in wide screen yet opting to have it shot bleakly in black-and-white. This is the opening of a tale told in six titled chapters and quite quickly the oddity of the piece increases substantially. The mother dies and Jón sets out to keep a promise to take her body for burial to Eyrabakkir in Southern Iceland. This involves a long journey in his battered Ford Cortina and it makes Driving Mum into a road movie. The quirkiness of it is illustrated by the fact that the corpse is not in a coffin but sat up in the backseat of the car and furthermore the dead woman can still speak. It’s mother who tells Jón when to turn left and when to turn right and she continues to nag him as she had done in life.
The music score by Tõnu Kõrvits plays an important role in setting the tone throughout. Its first major contribution comes when the journey south starts with Jon’s dog, Dreki, joining him and his dead mother in the car: the sound is jaunty but it also carries an undertone of sadness and that’s central to the film as a whole episodic though the tale is. Stretched rather daringly over 112 minutes, Driving Mum becomes at once a piece about strangers met on the journey and a work containing both surreal and dreamlike elements. In due course we realise the extent to which the mother’s own troubled life had led to her controlling that of her son including discouraging him years ago from leaving her and going off with a girl named Bergdís whom he had loved.
Early on there is a comic scene when on a narrow perilous road Jón’s car encounters a vehicle coming the other way. It's set up with a neatness that recalls the comic eye of Jacques Tati while Kaurismäki’s influence again seems prominent in a scene at a hotel stop where Jón encounters a flirtatious woman in the bar and there are renditions of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and ‘Yes, Sir, I Can Boogie’. But it is questionable how readily these elements stand convincingly beside the central idea of the dead mother still having a voice and the increasingly fantastical elements present in repeated encounters with a troupe of entertainers and in scenes in which a young woman in the present comes to represent Jón's lost love. That is not to deny that some of the scenes work better than one might expect. Jón’s scenes with the imagined Bergdís even carry echoes of the elderly professor who, on a journey in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, reflects on a past attachment of his while the troupe themselves suggest Fellini until a late shot featuring them brings another Bergman film to mind, The Seventh Seal. In yet another register we have an encounter between Jón and a helpful stranger (Tómas Lemarquis) who speak different languages but somehow bridge that gap even as the subtitles enable the viewer to recognise parallels in their histories.
Because Driving Mum is so unusual in almost every respect, it will surely divide opinion. One critic even dismissed it as a leg pull at the expense of the audience and some viewers will certainly be troubled by its changes of gear while others may never get on its wavelength at all. But such mixed responses could lead to it becoming a cult film and the theme of a parent holding onto a child and denying them a free life will resonate for many. The dog will appeal too and nothing about the film is mawkish. In so far as it could be considered a black comedy, Driving Mum is far less extreme than some other works from Iceland that can be seen in that light (it’s a description that has been applied to both 2013’s Of Horses and Men and to 2015’s Rams). While the eventual twists and turns are not ineffective and there's a neat touch when knitting again plays a role, I did at times found the film just a bit too odd. Nevertheless, I was often won over more than I expected to be and the piece is well cast. The ending of the film is in its own way as strange as anything else: the story takes place in 1980 but the closing song heard on the soundtrack is ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’ as recorded in 1944 by The Mills Brothers.
Original title: Á Ferð með Mömmu.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson, Kristbjörg Kjeld, Tómas Lemarquis, Hera Hilmar, Helgi Magnús Gunnarsson, Armundur Ernst Backman, Ester María Arnadóttir, Vilborg Þrastardóttir, Clifford Frei and Dreki.
Dir Hilmar Oddsson, Pro Hlín Jóhannesdóttir, Screenplay Hilmar Oddsson, Ph Óttar Guðnason, Pro Des Drifa Freyju-Árannsdottir, Ed Hedrik Mägar, Music Tõnu Kõrvits, Costumes Helga Rós Hannam.
Ursus Parvus/Alexandra Films S.A.-Tull Stories.
112 mins. Estonia/Iceland. 2022. UK Rel: 1 March 2024. Cert. 12A.
