Irish filmmaker John Carney got audiences singing with his mesmerizing indie musical Once in 2007. Flora And Son is another musical heart-warmer centering on a divorced mother Flora (Eve Hewson) bonding with her petty criminal son Max (Orén Kinlan) through music in order to keep him out of a juvenile facility. (Eve is the daughter of Bono Vox’s from U2). As Flora navigates a thorny relationship with her fourteen year old son and hands-off ex-husband Kev (Paul Reid), she gives Max a discarded guitar as a birthday gift – the day after his birthday. Naturally, he’s unimpressed because she forgot his birthday, so she takes guitar lessons herself with LA-based Zoom instructor Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
The idea for Flora And Son first sprouted in Carney’s imagination while thinking about his own mother during the pandemic. “I was thinking about her and my relationship with her as a kid. She passed away and my grief had turned into a stage of reflection where it didn’t make me sad to think about her anymore… I thought about certain things that she did that were important to me, but I wasn’t aware of that at the time,” recalls Carney.
Writing The Musical Film
The songs are an integral part of the storytelling in Flora and Son. They are all original and woven into the fabric of Flora and Max’s troubled relationship, and also the budding romance between Flora and Jeff.
John Carney
“We were about a week away from shooting and we had the songs ‘High Life’ and ‘Meeting In The Middle’ pretty far down the line,” adds Gary Clark, the film’s composer. At the time, ‘Meeting In The Middle’ was simply called ‘The Rooftop Song’ because that’s where Jeff and Flora composed and sang it. It’s their bonding moment as they figure out a catchy chorus and the bridge.
Flora And Son doesn’t follow the typical format of musical films according to Carney. Most have a dozen or so musical masterpieces like in ‘Guys And Dolls’ or ‘Singing In The Rain’ which accompany a strong story and plot. “It’s give me the best song you’ve got and I’ll make a scene around it,” jokes Carney.
“Flora And Son is distinctly different and it’s where I want to go with my career in terms of musical films. I don’t want to keep telling stories about the best song ever. It’s been done before.”
“I feel music is a much more complex, rocky, and interesting road with a myriad of stories of failure and success. It also strikes me that artists are also really interesting people. I want to tell stories about musicians, amateurs, people that sing at funerals, and people that sing at weddings. These stories are more interesting to me than just becoming a star,” he continues.
Music is about the brushstrokes. Anyone can learn to play a thousand chords, but it’s the order in which they’re played, and the way that they’re played, that really counts. “There are a number of times in the movie where music has this therapeutic, or some type of breakthrough effect, even if it’s not necessarily going to be a complete song. It moves the characters’ hearts, it brings them closer together or closer to someone else.”
Eve Hewson arguably has big musical shoes to fill. “She can step out of her father’s shadow and hold a tune. She holds her own,” declares Gary. “She didn’t look at this film as a musical. She looked at it as a continuation of her crazy character Flora and the way she was going to play her.”
Flora uses music to reach her son, not because she wants to become a famous singer
“When you first play a song, we forget how intimate the music was. It’s like stripping naked.” Clark quotes from the film when Jeff says to Flora, “‘I wrote a song. Would you like to hear it?’ That’s going to be one of those terrifying sentences to say. How much are you exposed? And I really do believe a line of music makes time stand still,” continues the composer.
Being a musician is a process of internalizing and externalizing emotions. Jeff says, “If your audience wants you to succeed more than you do, they’re open and they’re receptive.”
For Carney, filmmaking is also about subverting audience expectations. “I think that modern audiences are engaged because there are certain things that just eternally work. You know, boy meets girl, they end up together.”
I don’t consume movies for entertainment. I consume movies for enlightenment – John Carney
Flora and Max are on a collision course. He cites the tense scene of Max being sentenced to a juvenile facility after stealing a keyboard. Flora backs away because she thinks the disciplinary experience will do him good. Then she turns back to the judge and asks if he can have his music during his stint. The judge agrees. The filmmaker relishes these moments of surprise.
All this happens while Flora is simultaneously at her wit’s end with Max. She confesses, “I’m not even sure I want him to be home when I come home. Wouldn’t it be nice if he didn’t exist? That’s the third rail of motherhood. And somehow, you pull through and you love these flawed people anyway.”
Carney attributes such attitudes down to life in Ireland which can harbor certain toxic family dynamics. Family members tell each other exactly how they feel. Part of this comes down to the grip the Catholic church has on society. “You felt it behind the closed doors of all of these streets of my neighborhood… a couple was killing each other. Families were fighting. It was families that didn’t want to be together having to put on this face.'”
The Irish Sensibility
Had Flora And Son been made ten or twenty years ago, American audiences might have considered it to be a ‘foreign film’ in its setting, its tone, and its sensibility. It’s more of an Irish slice of life comedy-drama than an ‘American’ aspirational film. The American version might have been the story of Mid-Western, small town girl coming to a big city to make it big as a singer/ songwriter, overcomes massive obstacles, loses her guitar, finds it, and lands a lucrative recording contract.
Movies must somehow exist in a constant tug of war between domestic and foreign audiences while segmenting our common humanity. “I think this is absolutely an Irish film. It’s specific and authentic to the part of Dublin where it takes place,” asserts Irish-born producer Anthony Bergman. “There was never an idea of, ‘Let’s try to broaden this in a way to appeal to an international audience.'” The irony is, that sometimes, the broad universality of a movie lies in its narrow specificity. “I think that’s all of the emotions, the feelings, and the relationships that make it work. And it is about connection between people across large divides.”
Adds American-born producer Peter Bron, “I think it is a foreign film, but it’s a foreign film in a different way. It’s not what is commonly thought of as an American film with lots of explosions and with huge sequences of Billie Eilish singing a song that’s going to be really, really big.”
Flora (Eve Hewson) & Jeff (Jospeh Gordon-Levitt). Photo courtesy Apple TV+
“You have someone picking up a guitar while watching a version of a song on ‘The Voice’ and they’re not going to become a huge star at the end of that movie. That’s a ‘foreign’ idea. Flora And Son is a movie that is not aspirational in that way. It’s a movie that is going for human connections. It’s a movie that is going to try to talk about grounded, real ideas such as the relationships between a mother and a child,” Bron elaborates.
Long And Short-Distance Relationships
Flora has a best friend Kathy (Marcella Plunkett), who she cleans for. They spend a lot of time together, but it’s unclear whether they’re true friends or merely associates because they see each other almost daily. Their relationship is tested when Flora decides to go to Los Angeles to meet Jeff and asks Kathy to look after Max for a few weeks after he ex-husband Kev declines. Kathy resoundingly refuses to the point of being offended by the audacity of Flora’s request. “I’m always around when my friends need me, but when I need them, they’re nowhere to be found,” laments Flora. But there’s more to that exchange than self-interest. Kathy insists that Flora stay in Dublin and work on her relationship with Max. Jeff can wait.
Flora continues navigating her long-distance music education/ flirtation with her guitar teacher via Zoom. “I do think you can have very meaningful interactions on Zoom, but as soon as I log out, there’s this vast emptiness inside me, like something’s been taken from me. It’s almost like having a conversation through a keyhole,” decries Carney of the experience.
The tyranny of distance takes its toll, as does the tyranny of proximity.
“Eventually it just gets tiring. I wish I could see the rest of you, I wish I could touch your hand. It’s a very frustrating thing to me when you’re craving connection,” expands the filmmaker. This longing for intimacy through distance is beautifully offset when Flora imagines Jeff by her side in the same room. It represents the merging of virtual and live people.
Maturing As A Filmmaker
John Carney was asked if age brought happier endings to his films.
“When I was young, I was in love with tragedy because I had experienced so little of it. It was this exotic, intense thing. So when a child gets hurt or a dog is killed, these things shook me out of my complacency.”
“But as I get older and experienced more tragedy myself personally, I don’t ever want to see a dog get hurt on camera again. I lived through both of my parents’ deaths.”
We don’t watch films in a vacuum and experience them through the lens of current events and our past experiences.
“It’s such a dark world. I want to lift people up. And if I lift them up, maybe I’ll be lifted up too. Maybe we can give people a nice day where they walk out of a cinema and they go home and they feel uplifted by something that we did? And certainly now having kids, I feel like it’s a responsibility.”
“If it’s real art, it can start out really gloomy because it turns into something nice and new. If it feels genuine, if it feels truthful to people it can be good,” he concludes.
