As half of the Coen brothers, Ethan Coen has written and directed films with his brother Joel that pay tribute to many genres, while always looking unmistakably like Coen Bros movies.
Going back to 1984, their first feature, Blood Simple, was textbook noir: shot in the shadows, ordinary people doing unspeakably bad things, laden with atmosphere. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) leant into the snappy dialogue-driven dramas of the ’50s; No Country for Old Men (2007) adapted Cormac McCarthy’s novel with appropriate gravitas; The Big Lebowski (1998) was an absurdist comedy about friendship, bowling and a missing rug. The brothers have carved out their shared name as the go-to weekend entertainment for the university educated.
Margaret Qualley as the swaggering Detective Honey O’Donahue in Honey Don’t!.Credit: AP
After making The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, their 2018 western, they decided to take a break from working together. What now? Joel Coen chose to make an austere version of Macbeth with his wife, Frances McDormand. His brother, meanwhile, turned to a pleasure he shares with wife Tricia Cooke: B-movie trash. Out of the bottom drawer came a script they wrote 20 years earlier, just as a fun thing to do together, called Drive-Away Dykes. It was a crime caper about a lesbian adventuress and her timid friend who discover on a road trip – which includes a lot of stop-offs at lesbian bars in unexpected places– that they are inadvertently driving away some very dodgy goods.
Drive-Away Dolls, as it was renamed for distribution, had a very mixed response. Coen and Cooke, however, felt newly energised. The second in what will be their trilogy of lesbian genre films is Honey Don’t!. This time they have gone hard-boiled, with a detective played by Margaret Qualley – who also played the adventurer in Drive-Away Dolls – set against an assortment of dead bodies, dumb cops and a profiteering preacher played with great gusto by Chris Evans, aka Captain America. Like Drive-Away Dolls, it is shot with brightly lit verve by Australian cinematographer Ari Wegner.
Neither of them can say exactly what led them down this road. At the most basic level, they are writing the kind of movies they like to see. “We like B-movies, we like detective movies, we like genre movies and genre fiction of the hard-boiled kind: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, that kind of stuff,” Ethan Coen says. “So you write the kind of stuff that you find yourself liking as an audience or as a reader, but it’s unlike most examples of the form in that the detective is a lesbian.”
They are also on a kind of mission. Cooke says she started looking for films with lesbian characters as a student. “I didn’t really understand my sexual orientation until I was almost an adult, maybe 18,” she says. “And then, when I was very aware of who I was, I thought I’d watch some lesbian movies – and there just aren’t that many. This was the ’80s, so most of the ones that existed had tragic ends.” Queer cinema took off in the ’90s, but the films were still generally decidedly earnest. Where were the fun lesbians? The road movies and horror? “So we decided to do that because nobody was doing it.”
Tricia Cooke (left), Margaret Qualley and Ethan Coen on the set of Honey Don’t!.Credit: AP
Cooke joined the Coens’ team in 1989. Recently graduated from New York University’s film-making course, she got a job as a camera assistant on Miller’s Crossing, shooting in New Orleans. Unlike most film buffs of the time, she hadn’t seen Blood Simple or Raising Arizona, but someone had put in a good word for her. Later, when she expressed an interest in moving to editing, the brothers took her on as an apprentice in New York; meanwhile, a friendship was brewing. “Ethan asked me on a date, and we went to see Drugstore Cowboy,” she told Moviemaker magazine. “I told him, ‘I’m a lesbian, I’m not interested’.”
In the end, that didn’t seem to matter. They married in 1993 and had two children, now adults; the relationship has clearly endured in an unconventional way, with both husband and wife having other partners. “It’s not easy sometimes, and it can be very difficult for even our friends and family to understand,” Cooke said in the Moviemaker interview. “You navigate it one day at a time. We’ve been in this kind of dynamic for over 20 years, and we still take it one day at a time.”
Back in the ’90s, Cooke also had a thriving second social life in the bar scene; she was chief consultant on the look of the steamy dive bars where much of Drive-Away Dolls transpires but which, she has reported with some regret, barely exist any more. She has also directed short films on queer themes.
Honey Don’t! is set in Bakersfield in California, a downtrodden town on the edge of the desert full of peeling cement buildings, cracked pavements and dusty brown scrubland; Detective Honey O’Donahue’s office is in a strip mall. “It’s inland California, as opposed to glamorous coastal LA or San Francisco,” Coen says. “To Americans, I think it signified entrapment,” Cooke says.
Chris Evans plays a dodgy priest in Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen’s lesbian thriller.Credit: AP
As a character, Honey isn’t the kind of detective who melts into the background while snapping incriminating shots of unfaithful husbands; Qualley has devised a swaggering sashay and a visual style that would stand out anywhere, but certainly cuts a dash in the Bakersfield police station. “The essence of Margaret seems to work well for this genre in particular,” Cooke says. “I think she reminded us a little of Lauren Bacall. Those classic actresses.”
Honey finds herself involved after a woman turns up dead in a car crash the day after she left Honey a message saying she desperately needed the detective’s help. The trail leads to the Four Winds Church, where the seedy Reverend Drew Devlin urges his flock to find joy in submission, which he interprets very literally with whips, chains and the needier females in his deluded flock. He is also cavalier about murdering anyone who gets in his way, which may include Honey: cue vigorous fights involving kitchen utensils. Meanwhile, the enthusiastically promiscuous Honey meets her hot sexual match in MG, a rough but pleasing back-room police officer played by Aubrey Plaza.
Neither Coen nor Cooke can point to a particularly queer aesthetic in their brace of films. “In a perfect world, it would just be a detective movie where the detective is a lesbian,” Coen says. “We made this movie for that perfect world.” Says Cooke: “It gets politicised because, especially in our country, the LGBT community is politicised. We’ve always had to fight for our rights, and we’ve made such great strides and now there’s this big backlash because of the strides that were made. So even being able to have this voice on film is political now, for sure.”
Which leads us to the next film in the series – possibly again with Qualley playing a third lesbian character. “We’ve got her on a lifetime contract,” Coen jokes. It is already written. “Is it even a genre? It sort of is,” he says. “It’s a man-in-nature or woman-in-nature film. Or woman-in-God. The cosmos.”
But a B-movie? “Yes, it’s Walkabout, it’s Deliverance! What’s a trashy example of those films?” He can’t think of anything, which clearly pleases him. “Ours is going to be the first trashy one.”
Honey Don’t! is in cinemas from August 28.
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