Filip Hammar’s father Lars has lost his zest for life. An avowed Francophile and much-loved former teacher, Lars’ entering ‘le troisième âge’ has resulted in a slow decline towards depression and lethargy. This is to the consternation of his loving wife Tiina, who has remained fit and healthy, and his son Filip, a popular entertainer in Sweden. “It feels like you’re waiting to die,” Filip tearfully regales his dad at the beginning of the film.
So, together with professional partner Fredrik Wikingsson, Filip hatches a plan to reignite his father’s lust for life. Why not embark on a road trip from their home in Sweden to Beaulieu-sur-Mer in the south France, the blissful location of the family’s holidays in the 1980s and 90s?
Lars adores France and all things French. “My mother put a beret on my head when I was a young boy, and that guided my thinking,” he says in the film. He also loves how every Frenchman is “his own President,” who decides whether or not a red traffic light is worth stopping for.
The plan to drive down south seems idyllic but, as becomes patently obvious, age really is a handicap for Lars. Even before setting off, he slips on a hotel floor in Malmö and is hospitalised with a broken hip. At which point, there is an enforced change of plan. Filip and Fredrik drive on ahead, with the plan for Lars to fly down later to Brussels from where the three can resume their odyssey.
“Me and Filip got to spend more time together,” says co-director Fredrik of how the change of plan also effected a shift in the film’s emphasis. “I realized during our trip through Germany that this is really more about Filip than I thought, because I see that he’s sort of blind to his father’s decay, and maybe this trip is about him realizing that things can’t go back to what they were.”
“As a child, your parents bathe you. As an adult, you bathe your parents,” Fredrik advises his friend early in their drive, which Filip laughs off until later in the film when he is compelled to make good on this duty.
Nevertheless, the journey recommences, and the three travellers, driving in a Renault 4 (a favoured car of Lars, and bought by his son to add authenticity to the endeavour), cross the border into France. One of the first things Lars does is to take Catholic confession during a truly hilarious scene in which he admits (shamefacedly) to the very mildest of sins.
All the time Filip tries to create the best conditions (sometimes through the invention of the wildest stunts) to make Lars’ return to Beaulieu as memorable as possible. Some of these stunts go marvellously right, such as when Lars and Fredrik stage a fake stand-up row on the pavement by their café, so that Lars can marvel at French folk’s propensity towards both insouciance and fiery passion. Some stunts don’t work so well, such as when they attempt to replicate a scene in bar involving a parrot and a glass of beer, which Lars had witnessed years before. What’s more, Lars’ weakened physical state becomes even more evident late in the film as he tries to make his famed ratatouille – “the best in Europe.” It is a failed attempt that renders Filip desperate, very sad and very tearful.
That said, for Lars the French experience is both joyous and fulfilling as he records his thoughts on audio (as he always did on these trips) and firms up (even more) the close bond with his son. He is thankful for the adventure, and for both directors’ part in arranging it, realising not too late that, despite his advancing years and infirmities that “it is better to get the wrong train than to get stuck at the station.”
Since its release in March 2024, The Last Journey has become the most watched documentary in Swedish cinemas, with ticket sales well in advance of 400,000. Now it has been submitted in both the Best Documentary and Best International Feature Film Oscar categories.
“By taking a person on a road trip and revisiting moments and places he loved – it’s hard to completely change someone and turn him into a happy man,” observes Filip of his dad. “But for us, and I think for him as well, it was those moments where he basically forgot that he was depressed – when he laughed, when he had a good time – that were so rewarding to me and to Frederik, and hopefully to the audience as well.”
Despite the small subject at the film’s core – an old man being delivered back to the places where he was most happy during his life – there is a sense of enormity to the project. Yes, there is a universality to the story, but the film is also big in laughs, and big in its lachrymose moments. The stunts that the directors pull are elaborate, and a final scene on the beach involving a projector and a screen is as moving as anything that Giuseppe Tornatore achieved in Cinema Paradiso.
What’s more, the film has a touch of Dick Johnson Is Dead about it, in which loving filmmaker Kirsten Johnson finds numerous humorous and inventive ways to stage her father’s death as he faces an inevitable yet uncertain future with dementia.
Fredrik points to other films which inspired him and Filip, such as The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer. “That was a masterpiece. That’s taking a super heavy topic and doing something completely original and almost dangerous with it,” he says. “And this is not the same thing, of course, but our idea of re-enacting scenes was a little bit like Good Bye Lenin, which was a feature we were inspired by.”
All said, it would be easy to assume Lars to be a passive passenger throughout the film. Not a bit of it. At times he is comic gold. “My dad is an asset…because he is who he is,” Filip underlines. “What person can fill up a screen? What person can really carry a film just by his pure existence? Of course, we didn’t know it 100%, but fairly soon we were like, wow, he has got some funny bones. Funny bones that he’s aware of and funny bones that he’s not aware of.”
The directors are amazed by the public response to the film in Sweden. “We’ve been told so many stories through social media and emails, of personal stories about people seeing the film with their parents,” says Fredrik. “We have heard of people taking their 98-year-old grandfather to his favourite lunch place in Italy for one last beer. And they send us pictures, and you weep every time.”
“It has delivered way beyond our expectations, and obviously we hope it continues to deliver,” adds Filip. “And now with its Swedish submission to the Oscars, and we’re also submitted in the Documentary category, and I guess BAFTA and all of those things, we are just feeling like, let’s put in a real effort now as well. Let’s see how far this journey can take us.”
