Caught in the act of infidelity, Jamie, who has multiple affairs, handles yet another breakup with good nature. Marian, her best friend, on the other hand, leads a very chaste life. Temporarily on the street, the first agrees to drive a car from Pittsburgh to Tallahassee, taking the second along on the journey. However, unbeknownst to the two young women, who quickly take detours, gangsters are on their trail. Indeed, a mysterious briefcase is hidden in the rear trunk. In Drive Away Dolls (Girls on the run), a police comedy directed by Ethan Coen without his brother Joel, a lesbian angle is not enough to renew an adulterated plot.
Co-written by the filmmaker and Tricia Cooke (editor of several Coen brothers films, and who forms a couple in the city with Ethan Coen), Drive Away Dolls offers a scenario with narrow views and conventional figures.
So Jamie and Marian form a typical mismatched duo, with the fearless fanatic on one side and the timid homegirl on the other. The formula is proven, of course, especially in the context of a road movie, and the fact is that it works intermittently.
These successful moments are mostly attributable to Margaret Qualley (Novitiate, Stars at Noon/Stars at noon), who delivers a performance as energetic as it is verbal in the role of Jamie. Her accelerated delivery is matched only by that of Jennifer Jason Leigh in the much more successful Tea Hudsucker Proxy (Operation Hudsucker), by the Coen brothers.
Cast in the deliberately beige role of Marian, Geraldine Viswanathan never manages to transcend a narrative function of foil.
For their part, the romantic feelings that emerge between the two friends may be predictable, but they nonetheless ring false. Especially after Jamie insisted and insisted that Marian end her sexual inactivity with the first one to come.
Variable geometry
On this front, the story imagined nearly twenty-five years ago betrays its age of conception. In fact, this whole section concerning Marian’s sexuality recalls those teenage comedies from another era where the pressure to have sex – or to lose one’s virginity – constituted a valid narrative driving force.
Here again, the relative audacity of having two lesbian heroines is not enough to make us forget a nerdy attitude (we will rewatch or discover with much more pleasure the recent comedy Bottoms).
Moreover, regarding the representation of the lesbian community, this initially seems caricatured. However, ultimately, it is the entire approach of the film that is, and in a completely assumed manner.
In this regard, Drive Away Dolls summons many motifs specific to film noir, as in Blood Simple, which made the Coens known, within a deliberately outrageous aesthetic, as in many films by the two brothers. We are especially thinking of the police comedy Raising Arizona (Arizona Junior), with its pair of clumsy and squabbling criminals identical to that formed here by Joey Slotnick and CJ Wilson.
Unfortunately, alone behind the camera, Ethan Coen fails to compose a cohesive visual universe. The result is an artificiality, rather than an eccentricity, with variable geometry. Certainly, the performers seem to be having fun, but their pleasure is unfortunately not shared.