Grief is a wave that ebbs and flows between humour and tenderness in the expert hands of filmmaker Lilian T. Mehrel in her debut feature film honeyjoon. I had the pleasure of screening honeyjoon at its Canadian festival debut at the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) last fall, and have enjoyed watching its success unfold from the festival circuit to its theatrical release.
The film explores the complicated relationships grief leaves behind, following June and her Persian-British mother Lela as they travel together to the lush Azores to commemorate the anniversary of June’s father’s death.
This is where we diverge from expectation. From the very first scene, Mehrel subverts the viewer’s assumptions of what this film will be, swerving headlong into the juxtaposition of fantasy and reality in the hilariously awkward form of June’s interrupted pleasure and Lela’s travel constipation. The mother-daughter dynamic is incredibly believable and well-explored. June’s irritation will be familiar to anyone whose freedoms have been policed by a conservative parent.
While Lela remains repressed, June is the opposite, flirting her way through the honeymoon resort they’ve accidentally booked, as well as with the philosophical tour guide they hire, who, with his own hidden griefs, becomes a repository for both Lela’s unwanted maternal advice and June’s sexually frustrated desire. Ultimately, both women attain mutual acceptance when they learn to release the imagined versions they hold of themselves and each other.
Mehrel’s attention to texture and colour throughout the film is a delicious assault on the senses, from the pink of June’s string bikini to the sloughing bark of the trees in the forest, creating an emotional vocabulary for the grief each character struggles to articulate.
The film touches on the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and draws an interesting contrast between Lela’s mourning of the loss of women’s freedom in her homeland and the restrictions she attempts to place on her daughter. However, I wish this were explored more fully, as it opens a fascinating political dimension to the film's interrogation of women’s autonomy.
I especially like how by the end of the film, both women’s carefully constructed walls have come down, with the film refusing to resolve their journeys through the binary of sex vs soul, allowing both to coexist.
Overall, I found honeyjoon to be a poignant and charming reflection on the subtle echoes of grief and how it ties us together in more ways than we realize. But perhaps its most important message is that although we may not have grown into the women our mothers wanted us to be, we grew into the women we needed to be.
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