Programme Notes: Drive-Away Dolls

‘There's no time for me to act mature

The only words I know are "more", "more" and "more”!’

– Le Tigre, ‘Eau D’Bedroom Dancing’

Two best friends, a severed head on ice and a mysterious briefcase – what could go wrong? In Drive-Away Dolls, Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan play Jamie and Marian, a pair of 20-something lesbians on a road trip from Philadelphia to Florida, whose plans to ditch an ex and get laid go awry when they find themselves pursued not just by dyke drama, but shady criminals. Some questionable psychedelic interstitial scenes aside, this 80-minute romp is fun, fast-paced and characterful, with crackling chemistry between its leads and some diverting celebrity cameos. 

It’s a purposefully light B-movie, sure – but it holds significance as director Ethan Coen’s first narrative feature without brother Joel. Its freewheeling storytelling, increasingly absurd quest and oddball cast of characters place it alongside Burn After Reading and The Big Lebowski in the Coens’ filmography. After Joel’s solemn and classical The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021, it’s certainly interesting to see the Coens’ separate proclivities when working solo – their individual filmmaking personalities could even be projected onto Qualley’s good-time gal Jamie and Viswanathan’s serious-minded bookworm Marian. 

But it’s the input of co-writer Tricia Cooke that gives the film its edge. Ethan Coen’s wife and the brothers’ longtime editor, Cooke has identified as both queer and a lesbian (she and Coen call their marriage ‘non-traditional’) and it’s easy to see how this informs the film’s insight into lesbian life. There are sexual entanglements between friends, the aftermath of U-Hauling, and a lot (a lot) of dildos. Sometimes Jamie and Marian’s exploits cross into fantasy, like when they’re invited to a make-out party with an entire girls’ soccer team – a surprisingly pivotal sequence that propels the film’s vibe of heightened reality. Cooke’s background as an editor also plays into this, with expressive, cartoon-like cuts between scenes.

The fantasy elements of the storytelling work because the film is otherwise so grounded in authentic lesbian culture, giving the comic-book reverie something to pop against. The design elements are a large part of this, with production designer Yong Ok Lee (The Farewell, Minari) creating a believably lived-in world for Jamie and Marian to populate. The film is set in 1999 – just a few years before Cooke and Coen began writing the original script – but its lesbian bars are still recognisable today: slightly run-down joints with strings of multi-coloured lights, booths packed with butches, ESG and Le Tigre on the jukebox – and at least one in every stop along the way, a dream! 

The costuming is also on point, especially Qualley’s series of cut-off shirts and biker boots. When our heroes end up at a fancy hotel on one of their last stops, she puts on a plain black button-down for dinner – believable as the only smart-adjacent item of clothing she owns. My main quibble with the film is Qualley’s shaved armpits: a distractingly incongruous missed detail for a film otherwise so immersed in dyke aesthetics. 

As per the fate of any film daring to depict queer sex of any kind, much has already been noted about its many and varied sex scenes. But what is most refreshing is not how explicit the film is, but how it exploits the comedic potential of sex – whether in Marian’s subtle awkwardness towards it (and the eventual punchline after she does get some) or in Qualley’s over-the-top performance with what I will refer to as ‘Chekhov’s dildo’. 

It feels telling that, in an interview for Little White Lies, Coen states that Cooke is ‘in every way except name the co-director of the movie’. In its queer, fast-moving, comic-caper whirlwind, Drive-Away Dolls feels like a true marriage of the couples’ aesthetics and expertise – unsurprisingly for two people used to close familial collaboration. Enticingly, the pair reveal in the same interview that they’re working on scripts for a series of B-movies, with a detective noir also starring Qualley up next. With this, Bottoms and Love Lies Bleeding, are we on the cusp of a golden age of wide release lesbian genre pictures? Like the dream of Drive-Away Dolls’ lesbian bars, maybe soon they won’t be so few and far between.

Film, music and arts writer 

12 March 2024