Flora is a mum just about keeping it together, but there’s always a dance tune thumping in her head. If there’s a message to ‘Flora and Son’, it’s just that: Music is in the mundane, and inspiration is the poetry the universe writes you as you navigate this cruel, ugly world.
Take just the beginning of the musical journey Flora goes on: She literally finds a guitar in a skip. If that’s not allegorical, I don’t know what is. It is also of note that Eve Henson, who plays Flora, is the daughter of U2 frontman Bono. Regardless, her place as the front and centre of this film is far from undeserved.
Director John Carney, in an uncharacteristically bleak tone, paints a vivid picture of just how mind-numbingly grey Flora’s, life is, and perennially rainy Dublin is really the place to hammer that home. She even comments on how “it’s permanently grey here”.
We meet Flora’s son, Max, who is the archetype of an adolescent, surly and petulant in every breath. No matter how far behind you you your teen years may be, you will find relatability in all the bickering between Max and Flora.
Then, with a billion misplaced instincts playing inter-dimensional tug-of-war, the soothing velvet of a decidedly hipster online guitar teacher, renders her life positively prismatic. There’s not much information on how exactly Joseph Gordon-Levitt came by this role, but you can’t argue with how brilliantly he inhabits it: In their first interaction, he describes Topanga Valley, California to Flora with a husky, “I can smell eucalyptus on the breeze, can’t complain”, and his artistic nature begins to take Flora Irish cynicism in stride, enjoying the mazes he has to navigate to get through to her. In equal measure to this fascination, Flora harbours an enchantment with him.
Okay, I just found out how he came by this role: He was hard-headedly enthusiastic about it. He saw the script and loved it and found it quenching his thirst to be in a musical that wasn’t the infamous dance number from “500 Days of Summer”. Carney and the producers were looking for a musician to play the role, but Gordon-Levitt just wrote him a letter, and now we have what I consider to be a performance that will come to define this stage of his career. There is something irresistibly hunky about JGL in flannel, holding a guitar and singing a bittersweet campfire song of love past.
Given that the entire series of lessons is intercontinental and completely virtual, the chemistry dripping off the screen between Henson and Gordon Levitt in ‘Flora and Son’ is brilliantly palpable.
Flora’s discovery of music and the rest of ‘Flora and Son’ is not about the hot guitar teacher though. It is, as the title suggests, about her finding common ground with her much more rap-oriented son, and finding a reason to smile on the way to babysitting rich yoga-pants-clad mums’ kids.
Old passions reignite, and people who think their prime is past them find that they’re just getting started and things that don’t need to be said just…aren’t.
This, I think, is where John Carney really shines. He has this way of telling the most beautiful story about a connection between two adults without all the melodrama, but with all the complexity and highs and lows. All your big feelings come out, surreally but somehow still organically in song. It’s not a path much trodden where a musical winds such spirals around the line between being a musical and not.
The comparisons to the Ruffalo and Knightley starrer “Begin Again” (Also a John Carney film) are many: It tells the story of a disillusioned and jaded musical professional enraptured by a relative amateur, there’s a musician ex-partner whose ego is obnoxiously pervasive in the music surrounding him. There’s a petulant child who the parent feels removed from and finds a connection with through music. What I’m getting at is that ‘Flora and Son’ isn’t exactly pathbreaking, much less for Carney, but I wouldn’t change this formula for the multiple times it’s made me tear up and find genuine joy in cordial goodbyes and slightly reluctant platonism.
Dublin is the perfect canvas to paint this story on, knowing Carney’s deep knowledge of the setting. The entire story doesn’t stray far from Dublin’s 07 postcode, repped by Max in his opus Dublin07 (Reportedly a play on 007 when said out loud). Dublin’s Dallymount and L.A.’s Topanga Valley are paralleled in a musical number that had me holding my breath for all three minutes of it. Being in the throes of my own love affair with Ireland’s rainy capital, I can’t be too objective in saying that the love and attention given to showing Dublin the way ‘Flora and Son’ has is beautiful and authentic.
Finding purpose is unquestionably the strongest message here, and you’re left with the warm certainty of knowing that everyone you’ve come to care about in this movie, who you’ve watched go through a significant amount of trials, all those people have found their purpose. It’s astonishing how much personal development you can pack into a 100-minute movie, but Carney does, to great effect; Every single character with more than two lines has an arc and shows real, believable growth.
This warm reassurance is beautifully woven into our story, with three focal characters at different stages in their lives, all a bit misguided, a bit jaded and more than a bit beaten down. If you need to feel like you’re on your way to something better, and more fulfilling, watch this film. If you want to watch some grown-ups be grown-ups and watch some not-quite-grown-ups do some growing, watch this film. If you want to watch a mum pull herself together and find her reason, watch ‘Flora and Son’.
‘Flora and Son’ releases Sept 29th on Apple TV+ worldwide.
