Flora and Son Review – A Dusty Guitar Binds It All
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Being a mother is hard enough, but the difficult level goes way up if you are a high-school drop out and become a mom at seventeen. So 30-something Flora, a Dubliner who lives in a shoe-box size home, struggles to keep her teen son Max out of juvenile prison. She fixes up a guitar fished out from a dumpster and gifts it to Max as a way to keep him creatively distracted but he rejects the present. So, the guitar becomes Flora’s new refuge and eventually becomes a bridge between the feuding mother-son.
Written and directed by John Carney, known for “Modern Love”, the 2023 music based film “Flora and Son” stars Eve Hewson as the titular Flora, who cannot decide if she wants to be a frivolous party girl or a responsible mom to her delinquent teen. Orén Kinlan plays the rebellious Max, who is vociferously vocal about hating his mother and prefers spending time as his dad Ian (Jack Reynor), a struggling musician. “Me whole life you don’t get me anything, then you come home with this dusty piece of shit a day after me birthday and expect me to turn into Ed fucking Sheeran?” is his strong worded rejection of his mother’s gift (guitar).
Eve Hewson is feisty as Flora, a young woman grappling to find equilibrium between her vivacious party-girl persona and the responsibilities of motherhood, often resorting to escapism or sheer childish antics herself to evade reality. Eve Hewson emotes a whole range of emotions with just her eyes, be it an animal-like lust for a stranger at a club, angst for not being able to rein in her son, or a puppy-like smitten face for her new guitar teacher, the actor captures Flora’s capricious personality with engaging vigour. Which brings one to the guitar teacher – Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Jeff, a failed American musician who lives in LA and offers online Guitar classes. Flora signs up for his class and their first class is ridiculously boring, with the interactions sounding like Flora signed up for some spiritual retreat. But Jeff is cute, so Flora keeps coming back for more and learns the Guitar with an impressive speed, although, their interactions make it hard to believe she learned anything at all!
“Flora and Son” picks up pace only after the first 30 minutes and has a much better second-half, where the characters finally start having more realistic interactions than phoney scripted conversations. Flora and Max’s Tom & Jerry like relationship remains central to the story, even though the plot threatens to become a soppy long-distance romance between Flora and Jeff. It’s hilarious how after mocking Ed Sheera, Max ends up writing a very Sheeran-like pop love song called “I’ll Be the One”, which was a very cute teenage number and Flora even convinces Max into making a music video out of it. The mother-son bonding over the video was the sweetest scene in the film. However, it’s not all hunky-dory for the family and prison seems to become a real threat as Max refuses to mend his ways.
The original soundtrack by John Carney and Gary Clark is the heart of the tale as music emerges as the biggest hero in “Flora and Son”. It acts as a slow balm that helps repair Flora’s broken relationship with her son and gives both more direction in their life. A track called “Meet in the Middle” that Flora sings with the guitar teacher Jeff on a terrace video call had a very “La La Land” (the 2016 musical which received 11 Oscar nominations) charm to it. Joseph Gordon-Levitt sings and plays like a professional in the film, while Eve Hewson’s voice is rawer and in sync with her character.
From starting out as slow story about a trashy clueless mother in constant battle against her teenager, “Flora and Son” lives up to its title, delivering a quirky emotional mother-son tale with a dash of romance on the sides. While the best of stories start to fizzle out by the climax, John Carney’s musical bows out on a high point, with a fun live performance of an original song by the protagonists.
Rating: 7 on 10. You can stream “Flora and Son” on Apple TV.
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