Girls on the run | The secret is in the suitcase

Wishing to go to Florida, a sassy young woman and her timid roommate mistakenly rent a car intended for criminals.

Drive Away Dolls (Girls on the run in French version) is the first film that Ethan Coen directed without his brother Joel (Fargo, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men). It is also the first feature film he wrote with his wife, editor and producer Tricia Cooke. Together, they wrote a short film, Don’t Mess with Texas, directed by Cooke and Carrie Schrader; two lesbians on the run provoked the staff and customers of a Texan restaurant. Their collaboration should have ended with this very ordinary short relying without subtlety on sexual clichés that we find in bulk in Drive Away Dolls.

This road movie would also be the first part of a B-movie lesbian triptych that Coen and Cooke have been having fun writing for around twenty years. This could explain why the humor turns out to be so out of sync. The couple’s next project should be titled Honey Don’t and starring Aubrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley as lesbians on the run. The latter’s unbridled game, notably seen in My Salinger Yearby Philippe Falardeau, and alongside his mother Andie McDowell in the Netflix series Maidundoubtedly proves to be the most entertaining element of this desolate pochade.

Having just broken up with Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), a strong-willed police officer, Jamie (Qualley), a free-spirited young woman, offers her uptight roommate, Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), a road trip to Tahalassee, in Florida. Following a misunderstanding, the two friends rent the car reserved by two thugs (C. J. Wilson and Joey Slotnick). Their boss (Colman Domingo) then orders them to recover the precious contents of the suitcase stolen from a collector (Pedro Pascal) then hidden in the car. Added to this wild game of cat and mouse are a hippie (Miley Cyrus), who appears in psychedelic sequences, and a conservative senator (Matt Damon).

Borrowing from the codes of road movies and films of sexploitation from the 1970s, Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke created a film that failed miserably to entertain us. If some outrageous scenes manage to raise a smile, many of the jokes fall flat or cause discomfort as they seem to have been written several decades ago. The most embarrassing in Drive Away Dollsthis is the degrading manner of Ari Wegner, brilliant director of photography of the dazzling The Power of the Dog, by Jane Campion, to light and frame the actresses, particularly in the very crude scenes of a sexual nature. A disturbing anachronism.

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Comedy of manners

Drive Away Dolls (VF: Girls on the run)

Ethan Coen

Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein

1:24 a.m.

4/10