The Last Journey
In Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson’s appealing documentary, Filip’s ageing father is taken on a road trip to the south of France.
Image courtesy of Dogwoof Releasing.
This Swedish production has been hugely successful on its home ground and that may well have been assisted by the fact that Swedes who watch television will be very familiar with the film’s two directors who also appear in it. Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson in addition to being established journalists and authors have as a duo become highly popular television personalities. But, even if their names helped to lure in audiences in Sweden, The Last Journey is a film of immense appeal that deserves to attract viewers wherever it is shown.
That it works so well is all the more a credit to Hammar and Wikingsson because getting the film’s tone right was by no means easy. The Last Journey is in fact centred on Filip Hammar's father, Lars, who was eighty when the film was made (he was born on 15th of July 1942 so is now eighty-two). He had been a very popular high school teacher who for forty years taught French in a Swedish town called Köping but in 2008 he had retired. At the time he had looked forward to what he foresaw as being a new lease of life but instead, despite having a loving wife in Tiina and a caring son in Filip, his life had been hampered by health issues and had closed down. Indeed, the film shows him to us as a frail and decidedly elderly man who has for long done nothing but sit at home in a favourite old armchair. Just sitting there day after day he has lost all his spark. Filip’s unexpected reaction supported by Tiina was that something drastic needed to be done in the hope that his father would recover his interest in life. What Filip proposed was that he and Fredrik, the latter not just a professional partner but a long-term close friend, should drive Lars to the south of France in a Renault 4 car. This would be a recreation of a trip in the distant past when the family would holiday in Beaulieu-sur-Mer as seen in their old photographs. The journey might well be the last that Lars would undertake, but it would enable him to renew his acquaintance with the land which he had come to love and indeed to meet again people known to him in Beaulieu-sur-Mer.
The film invites us to share this journey and one can recognise at once that this is potentially heartwarming material. Nevertheless, it carried risks as the basis of a feature film. One such was the possibility of it falling into sentimentality while another lay in the fact that dealing with what might be the last journey of an old man could turn it into a depressing experience for the viewers. There is another factor involved too in that the film obviously wants us to support the undertaking but we might wish to question whether or not pushing the idea of doing it was really in the interests of a man who was so clearly fragile. Filip seems so insistent that we wonder if he has some need in himself to see his father make this journey and while we ask that question the film never fully answers it.
All of these points could be problematic for the film and yet it overcomes them. A number of factors play a part in this. Incidental assets include the fact that the journey to the south of France is very appealingly photographed and that this is quality filmmaking (this is in fact the second feature film to have been made by Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson). More importantly we know that Tiina approves and are fully aware of Filip's love for his father even if other factors may be in play too. And it is, of course, a case of Filip and Fredrik doing the driving so the strain on Lars is limited albeit that to be away from home at his age might carry a risk in itself (indeed at one point early in their travels he does have a fall which could have meant abandoning the trip). But while we may hold back from fully endorsing the journey we want it to succeed and Lars himself is an engaging presence. In getting the balance right the music score by Christina Olsson plays a special role: it is sufficiently cheery to keep us optimistic about everything without becoming too light-hearted having regard to all of the implications of this undertaking. In addition, the fact that Lars himself is fond of old songs allows for unforced references to the likes of Jacques Brel, Georges Bressens and Harry Belafonte supported by snatches of their recordings.
In this instance, I don't feel that it spoils anything to reveal that the trio do indeed reach Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Once there Filip and Fredrik seek to replicate incidents that echo the time that Lars had spent there in his younger days. The first of these is humorously handled, but by the time that this element extends to hiring actors to play out a street scene it comes to seem a bit forced (is it, one asks, in part a means of filling in the film’s running time to make it feature length?). But, if I had doubts about that, it is far more important that otherwise the film feels genuine rather than something set up for filming and, best of all, we can see for ourselves that the trip is a success since Lars vividly engages and responds. It could even be said that his soul is brought back to life and that ultimately is why The Last Journey connects so strongly with audiences.
Original title: Den sista resan.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Filip Hammar, Lars Hammar, Fredrik Wikingsson, Tiina Hammar.
Dir Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson, Pro Lars Beckung and Petra Måhl, Ph Erik Persson, Erik Vallsten and Robin Trolin, Ed Johan Kjellberg Elgemark and Robin Wikner, Music Christina Olsson.
Nexiko/Noridisk Film distribution RMV Film/Sveriges Television-Dogwoof Releasing.
91 mins. Sweden. 2024. UK Rel: 20 June 2025. Cert. PG.
