With her new feature debut, Honeyjoon, writer/director Lilian T. Mehrel has created a lovely mother-daughter story about loss, grief and ultimately joy and understanding, one that adds some unlikely current political resonance.
The setup of the story is that June (Ayden Mayeri), who’s in her early-20s, is on a trip to Portugal’s Azores Islands with her mother Lela (Amira Casar, who played Timothee Chalamet’s mother in Call Me By Your Name). It’s the first anniversary of the death of the family’s father, and the two are visiting a resort that was of significance to him.
The only other major character is João (José Condessa), a hotel employee and tour guide who emerges as a potential love interest. This is a movie that’s not afraid of horniness. Both mother and daughter are Iranian-Americans of Kurdish extraction, and the narrative takes place against the backdrop of the Woman. Life. Freedom protests that began in 2022, and the subsequent violent crackdown by the Iranian regime.
Amid all that, there’s the familiar tension between an immigrant parent and their more assimilated child, but it has a unique twist: Lela spends much of her time doomscrolling about what’s going on back in Iran, while it doesn’t stop her from getting into arguments with her daughter about immmodest dress. The film, however, doesn’t exactly take either woman’s side.
Honeyjoon, which arrived in theaters this week, debuted at the Tribeca Festival a year ago, after the director won a $1 million grant at Tribeca the year before that. There’s no way the filmmakers could’ve known that the film would come out while the U.S. was at war with Iran, much less a war that appears highly unlikely to dislodge the regime, nor to make any priority of advancing the noble goals of the Woman. Life. Freedom movement.
And while watching Honeyjoon, I also thought a lot about Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi, another Iran-born feminist artist and critic of the Iranian regime, who passed away last week, only to have her death greeted by a deranged tankie backlash. Those are the sorts of people allergic to human complexity, something Honeyjoon offers in spades.
This week also sees the debut of a very different, and less successful, directorial debut movie about a girls’ trip, also told through a feminist lens. That’s Find Your Friends, directed by Izabel Pakzad, and it debuted last year at the Fantasia Film Festival before landing on Shudder this Friday. It’s the story of a group of hard-partying female college students (Helena Howard, Bella Thorne, Zion Moreno, Chloe Cherry, and Sophia Ali) who go on a girls’ trip to the Joshua Tree area in Southern California.
One of the women suffers a couple of attempted sexual assaults, and others don’t believe her, from police to her own friends. Later, the group is menaced by a group of men in a truck who seem intent on doing something unspeakable to them. When I went to Joshua Tree, it was populated mostly by hippies who fired up joints mid-climb, not by trucks of rampaging rapists, although I recognize my experience isn’t universal, and the director has said in interviews the film is based on her own experience. There are some good ideas here, but they didn’t hang together; this film isn’t coherent.