(courtesy IMP Awards)
When a schism develops slowly and over time between you and someone foundationally woven into your life, it can feel well nigh impossible to bridge it in any meaningful way.
Years of quiet warfare, not wished for or intended can leach the bedrock of this primal connection until it is there in name only, an idea of a familial bond that has no real meat to it or sense of daily communion.
That is precisely where Flora (Eve Hewson) finds herself as Flora and Son opens, a single mother who shares a postage stamp apartment with her 14-year-0ld malcontented son Max (Orén Kinlan) who disappears into his room when he is there, tethered to his secondhand laptop by giant headphones, only emerging to hang with the wrong crowd and engage in petty crime to such an extent that he is one retail robbery away from time in juvenile detention.
Things are not good, and while Flora does her best working as a “mother’s helper” to wealthy Dubliners, money is always an issue, as is custodial care which she nominally shares with her estranged husband Ian (Jack Reynor) who treats parenting as a low-level obligation that he’s done quite enough of thank you.
No wonder Max, who arrived when Flora was 17 and interrupted all her plans and dreams, feels resentful of parents who treat him like he is the one thing that derailed their grand plans for wholly fulfilled and worthwhile adulthood.
That’s not to say that Flora doesn’t love Max but after brooding over the things she believes she has lost, she finds it hard to separate her love for him from a sense that he has cost her something.
All that changes one day when, walking home from work, Flora spots a guitar in a rubbish skip and after fishing it out, gets it repaired with the idea that max can learn the instrument, stay out of trouble and find something worthwhile to do with his time.
It doesn’t quite work out that way, but not necessarily in a bad sense with Flora signing up for online guitar lessons with American Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and finding she’s not good at playing the item of rubbish rescue but that she has a gift for writing songs too, something she accidentally finds out she shares with Max who’s spent much of his time writing some very catchy dance tracks.
As in all of writer-director John Carney’s films – he has previously released Once, Begin Again and Sing Street – Flora and Son is a ringing, quietly powerful love letter to the way in which music can redeem, connect and heal, and how when all else fails, there is a connective wonder to be found in putting music and lyrics together and giving voice to the stunted creativity within.
If that sounds hackneyed or twee at first glance, it is anything but.
Like its predecessors, Flora and Son possesses a muscular sense of how emotional healing can happen when we finally drop all our preconceptions and twisted ideas of who we are and who those we are close to might be, and we let ourselves see the world, us and them as they really are.
It takes some bravery to do that but Flora is as brave as they come, and while things are rocky at first with her and Jeff, who connect in a profound way that surprises and then delights them both, Flora sticks at her guitar lessons with a dogged determination that soon flows into the relationship with Max.
It’s the rebuilding of the once-tight bond between them that informs much of the movingly thoughtful narrative in Flora and Son which, while it might have a softly-realised and groundedly nuanced rom-com element percolating away between Jeff and Flora, has at its heart what happens when Flora and Max find something that unites rather than separates them.
It’s a joy to watch, made all the more involving by the fact that Carney doesn’t flick some magic narrative switch once music begins to glue mother and son somewhat back together again, letting some harsh realities and home truths play to their logical conclusion.
Even in the finale which is reasonably by-the-book but no less affecting for that, there’s still some simmering tension between mother and son but it’s expressed as an outworking of dynamics they both know about and can allow for, robbing it of its hitherto destructive power.
Music then is a salve, not a complete instrument (word choice wholly intended and unapologetically stood by) of healing, and the great strength of Flora and Son is that while it is a musically enhanced fairytale of sorts, it isn’t so powerful that it can fix absolutely everything that ails you.
The point is, and it is made powerfully well in scenes full of musical joy and quietly happy and delighted music-driven reconnection, that it bring you back to those long separated from you emotionally in such a way that other connection can take place and you can find the lost things you once had, or perhaps never had in the first place.
Max, it should be noted, has always found purpose and solace in his music, and as Flora finds the same, it becomes clear that here is the missing ingredient that has long eluded Flora who wants to be a good mum but who can’t get ride of enough of that sense that she has been robbed somehow to really surrender herself to the role.
Music makes that happen, but more importantly, Flora and Son establishes with clarion loveliness and a flawed sense of charm that it only works because Flora finds what she’s been wanting all her life – a reason to get out of bed in the morning that is fulfilling to her as a person and not just as a mum.
The joy of Flora and Son, which does have the musically-drenched happy endings of all of Carney’s luminously wonderful films, and which is full of songs penned by Carney and collaborator Gary Clark,is that it offer the idea that music can save and restore and enrich and that even though it’s not a magic wand of notes and lyrics, it’s powerful enough that if you’re open to it, it can fix things enough that you have the time and perspective to take a broken a broken life the rest of the way to some type of long-lasting healing.