Honey loves them too, and the delight of Qualley’s performance in Honey Don’t! lies in its witty, vivid revision of a vintage noir archetype. Cruising through town in a series of neatly tailored ’40s-style ensembles, Honey is a throwback with progressive tendencies: the femme fatale as life force. She’s also an out lesbian who wears her orientation proudly on her blouse’s crisp white sleeves. Not only has Honey gotten good at living without attachments—she’s a serial dater who sometimes swoops in to assist her kid-infested older sister (Kristen Connolly)—but she excels at deflecting men’s attention without overtly emasculating them. The latter is a daily man Pestered for a date by a smitten local detective, she tells him sweetly that she has her book club that night. It would seem that Honey has her book club most nights.
Honey Don’t! is Qualley’s second go-around with director Coen. The first, 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls, was a screwball road-trip romance, with Qualley styling herself—impressively, if also a bit exhaustingly—as a live-action Looney Tune, a distaff Daffy Duck with a Southern drawl. The film was small (petite, really), but nevertheless became the subject of outsize media attention owing both to the Coen brothers’ much-publicized creative separation following 2018’s Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and the very public discussion around its co-writer-producer Tricia Cooke’s queer identity and the ways that her “nontraditional” marriage to Ethan led to the creation of a film that explicitly—in every sense of the word—foregrounded lesbian protagonists, relationships, and community.
For many nonplussed (or downright dismissive) critics, the loose, borderline-careless construction and psychedelic interludes of Drive-Away Dolls suggested a kind of low-stakes throwaway. But the film’s good-natured carnality was also its own reward: It offered a welcome wrinkle in the neat-freak Coen canon, like a well-used set of sheets left crumpled on a motel bed. Meanwhile, the script’s strident Bush-era satire—centered on a closeted Republican politician (an uncredited Matt Damon) anxiously pushing family values in the midst of various indiscretions—is filtered through a recognizably Coen-esque critique of empty suits sweating their own dubious potency.
When he’s not giving sermons rationalizing submission as self-actualization, Father Drew is tending to members of his flock one-on-one (and sometimes via threesomes), spreading his seed and his wisdom (such as it is) simultaneously. Mocking religious zealots is easy, but Evans inhabits the role with the callowness of an obvious nonbeliever, a quality made funnier in the context of Evans’s former day job as Captain America. Confronted by Honey over the death by car crash of a young female follower—one of several fatalities tied in some way to his church, an unfortunate set of events that gives the film its shape—Father Drew tries to use Christianity as a come-on, insisting that a little piety might “open [her] right up.” “I’ll stick with my dildo,” Honey replies with a practiced deadpan. “It opens me up and there isn’t a creep attached to it.”
That “almost” is important: For all its very real charms—not least of which is the frank, fleshy tenor of its sex scenes—Honey Don’t! doesn’t fully work, even on its own scaled-back terms. If anything, the sub-90-minute run time doesn’t allow for enough local color or scenic detours; in tightening up their storytelling after Drive-Away Dolls, Coen and Cooke have come up with something more mechanical, in which the tail wags the shaggy dog. There’s also something uncalibrated and off-putting about the violence doled out in the home stretch—an ugliness meant, perhaps, to evoke the blood simplicity of Ethan’s salad days—and also some pretty heavy, literal-minded symbolism involving a caged bird that smacks up against its own obviousness. The point has to do with the enduring constraints of patriarchy—the flip side to the film’s more seductive (and successful) avatar of freedom, a nameless, mob-connected European seductress (Lera Abova) who rocks a leopard-print bikini, packs heat, and rides in and out of the story on a Vespa. As a putative muse and obscure object of desire, Abova’s character resembles the woman on the beach in Barton Fink and the dancer in the red dress in The Hudsucker Proxy; her peregrinations make a case for following one’s muse. With Qualley to appear in the third installment of Coen and Cooke’s proposed “lesbian B-movie trilogy” (tentatively and promisingly titled Go, Beavers!), Honey Don’t! looks set to join its predecessor as a movie worth enjoying more for the journey rather than the destination—a klutzy, click-clacking step in the right direction.
Hence then, the article about honey don t is all dressed up with no place to go was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Honey Don’t! Is All Dressed Up With No Place to Go )
Also on site :