In “Drive-Away Dolls”, the women seen by Ethan Coen, between nymphomania and excessive prudery

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT

It was at the age of over 60 that Ethan Coen emancipated himself from the duo he had formed for four decades with his brother Joel. His first fiction produced alone, Drive Away Dolls, does not, however, venture very far from the universe built between them: the film rehashes the glorious 1990s when the Coen style was consolidated, redrawing with others (Soderbergh, Tarantino) the contours of American cinema. Resumed then, but brought up to date in the form of repentance: the cinema of the Coen brothers has always been a man’s world, and women, the great “Other” of their cinema, an inexhaustible source of anguish for their heroes. Drive Away Dolls conveniently reverses the formula by trying to follow a female duo – and we sense that it costs him, Ethan.

Or Jamie (Margaret Qualley), an extroverted lesbian who has many one-night stands, and her best friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) who prefers to read Henry James in bed rather than accumulate conquests there. After a stormy breakup, Jamie finds himself on the street and agrees to drive a car from Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) to Tallahassee (Florida), taking Marian by his side. During their journey, the two young women are unaware that the car they are driving contains a precious briefcase hidden in the rear trunk – a gang of dangerous gangsters will soon come after them.

Sloth medley

We find there nothing more nor less than a lazy medley of the work of the Coen brothers: between fanciful road movie (Arizona Junior, 1987), neonoir (Fargo1996), narration bouncing around a wide range of archetypal characters and psychedelic parentheses borrowed from The Big Lebowski (1998).

The film could have had the charm of the old standard that we know by heart, if Ethan Coen did not feel obliged to give assurances to a possible female and feminist audience who would judge it harshly: we will therefore find a lesbian bar filled with truckers, a heroine with a strong Texan accent obsessed with sex, another who is just waiting to be unstuck, and both are obviously in search of a penis that will soon arrive – at best, it’s cartoonish , at worst, absolutely corny. Between nymphomania and excessive prudery, there is, in Ethan Coen, an impossibility of producing an accurate image of women. It would undoubtedly have been better never to venture onto this dark continent.