The nexus of trite and thesis-like is where Lilian T. Mehrel’s Honeyjoon coalesces; a light, personal rumination on the shared experience of grieving, Mehrel’s easygoing feature debut holds its own as a thematic package deal encompassing the intertwined subjects of womanhood, generational gaps, and — as Carol Ann Duffy put it — that “wobbling photo of grief” which ebbs and flows and never quite settles into consistency. It is a pleasant enough sketch of an unspoken if long-standing estrangement between a mother and daughter that mends, if only for a brief week, on a nostalgic trip across a foreign shore. With the first anniversary of her father’s death approaching, June (Ayden Mayeri) heads to the Azores with her mother, Lela (Amira Casar), in tow. A place where the deceased had himself visited when grieving his own father, the Azores offers diversions aplenty, and no little potential for escapism; but for the mother-daughter duo, complications invariably arise when everyone else along the archipelago seems in a celebratory mood and the hotel they’ve booked is filled all with honeymooning couples except them.
From this ironic disconnect arrives a comedy of therapeutic manners, as Mehrel sketches out her characters in an emotionally honest but chronically shallow journey of discovery and catharsis. The therapy slant is not unearned: Lela herself is a literal specialist paid to psychoanalyze her patients and absorb their neuroses into her anxious, jaded person, while June has ostensibly more curative intentions for this respite than her sullen mother. Opening with a calculated and wryly funny scene of June masturbating in bed, during the minutes Lela’s away in the loo, Honeyjoon quickly preempts and rebukes the moral hypocrisy its matriarch figure comes to represent. Sputtering her outrage at the anti-regime protests in Iran, Lela complains throughout the trip about the unjust suffering and misogyny under its religious clergy while paying little attention to her own dismissive attitude toward her daughter. Embarking on a day tour right before they’re due to scatter the father’s ashes, mother and daughter acquaint themselves with their young guide João (José Condessa), for whom the happiness of surfing the occasional big wave has much in common with the coming and going waves themselves.
Tender though its breeze may be, Honeyjoon’s attempts at weaving the personal and political into a microcosm of a particular generational and diasporic experience — the affluent Persian-British rebel class so desperately identified by Lela against the self-oppressed adherents of veiled Islam — tend to fall flat, as its emotional rhythms resist deeper dissonance, rooted as they are in the whimsical comfort of a casual travelogue whose scant 80 minutes precludes more meaningful engagement between Gens X and Y. The film favors texture, deliberately bookended by the haze of Super 8 memory and dotted with snippets of iPhone spontaneity. Yet while these contribute to its sense of personality, the said personality’s type has little more wit and a tad more somberness than an elevated Hallmark production. June and Lela’s eventual divergence into self-rejection and acknowledgement respectively proves clever, but such a moment comes too sparingly to keep their existential honeymoon afloat. While the clarity of grief is welcome, too often do its mourners wallow in empty calories.
DIRECTOR: Lilian T. Mehrel; CAST: Ayden Mayeri, Amira Casar, José Condessa, António Maria, Tiago Sarmento; DISTRIBUTOR: Utopia/Circle Collective; IN THEATERS: June 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 20 min.
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