Honey Don’t: a routine Coen dynamited by a flamboyant Margaret Qualley
Ethan Coen’s second solo feature, Honey Don’t features the confrontation of a sexy private detective and a mafia pastor. A conventional neo-noir, saved by its unleashed actress.
Shown at Cannes 2025 in a midnight screening, then deprived of release in French cinemas, Honey Don’t is the second part of a “lesbian B-movie trilogy”, conceived by Ethan Coen (who has not filmed with his brother Joel since The Ballad of Buster Scruggs eight years ago) with his wife, editor and co-writer Tricia Cook. The previous one, the laborious road movie Drive Away Dollsbased on a script abandoned in the depths of a drawer in the 90s and dusted off in a hurry, compiled the worst clichés of Coenian cinema and bore witness to Ethan’s difficulties in reinventing himself after forty years of fraternal association.
The (little) good news is that Honey Don’t gives a little more pleasure than Drive Away Dolls. It’s a more coherent and inventive film, even if it repeats an outdated aesthetic – a mix between Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!the sober John Waters of the 90s, the serial tarantinade and the thrillers of Jim Thompson. The ambition is once again to fly the colors of the lesbian pride (Tricia Cooke is a lesbian, for those who are wondering what Ethan Coen is doing in this area), while also attacking the hypocritical puritanism of Trumpist America – here played by Chris “Captain America” Evans, in the role of the faux-derche pastor of a small Californian town, who spends less time evangelizing his flock than having orgies in the sacristy. It is on this level, that of the anti-MAGA cultural battle, that the film is the least convincing, the most heavy and predictable – which was already the main pitfall of Drive Away Dolls.
But what about pleasure? It comes mainly from the performance of Margaret Qualley, who has a lot of fun playing Honey O’Donahue (the co-creator of Barton Fink And The Big Lebowski remains quite brilliant when it comes to naming his characters), private detective leading the investigation in his dusty town without ever taking off his stiletto heels, and giving the impression of changing outfits three times a day, when all the other protagonists seem to have been marinating in the same clothes since the end of the conquest of the West. A way for Ethan Coen to blend in the same character the archetype of the private and that of the femme fatale – an idea which Qualley seizes with irresistible mischief.
Throughout a slightly loose and frankly not very interesting police plot, we cling to Honey, to her relationship that is both torrid and sensitive with a cop played by Aubrey Plaza, as well as to some very graphic and very absurd scenes of violence, where the youngest of the Coens demonstrates that he still has some good leftovers. The difference in quality between Drive Away Dolls And Honey Don’t is such that we even hope that this informal trilogy will lead to a third episode Really interesting. Unless Joel and Ethan end up mending each other artistically in the meantime?
Honey Don’tby Ethan Coen, with Margaret Qualley, Chris Evans, Aubrey Plaza… Available on MyCanal.
