“I’ve had it with love. I know bards and troubadours are high on it, but I don’t believe it’s relevant to the modern 20th soon to be 21st century lesbian.”
Jamie
Ethan Coen’s first feature as a solo director is a delirious sapphic road-trip set in 1999 but frequently adopting the sensibilities of exploitation movies from the decades prior. Drive-Away Dolls follows two friends on a trip to Florida, pursued by inept criminals seeking to recover a briefcase hidden in their car. In terms of classic Coen styles, it leans more toward the screwball comedy of Burn After Reading than its crime thriller elements, while visually blending eccentric antagonists, lesbian dive bars and raunchy sequences into a Lebowski-esque 90-minute fever dream. At its heart is the central friendship between Margaret Qualley’s uninhibited fast-talking Texan and Geraldine Viswanathan as her reserved and repressed best friend — your enjoyment likely hinges on how you connect with these characters and the film’s earnestly tender moments between them. Particularly by Coen standards, Drive-Away Dolls feels rough around the edges but it brings a fresh energy to its atypical queer romance and seems primed for cult appreciation rather than mainstream success.
7/10
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