In Sweden, Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson are known as “Filip och Fredrik”. They’ve been a local screen fixture since the early 2000s, starting as tag-team youth TV presenters doing crazy things all over the world. Search online for their early travel show Grattis världen, and you’ll find that time they came to New Zealand where they went bungy-jumping while dressed as Lord of the Rings characters, then spent much of the episode getting wasted in a spa pool.
“We were young and foolish, and we needed the money,” says Wikingsson. “That show may not have aged well.”
Eventually, they grew up, went mainstream, hosted various talk, game and quiz shows, and, having started their own production companies, branched out into movies.
The pair’s second joint feature is The Last Journey. It stars both of them and Hammar’s elderly father Lars. For a large part of the film, the three are inside a slow-moving 1980s orange Renault 4 – “the most overtaken car in Europe” as one quips – as they drive from Sweden to the South of France. That’s where the Hammar family once holidayed every summer. Hammar senior is a retired French teacher and lifelong Francophile.
It didn’t start as a film. The Los Angeles-based Hammar thought taking him on a memory-lane trip to the Mediterranean would help his father out of a post-retirement funk, which had his mother worried.
“My dad has just been sitting in a chair for the last decade thinking about death instead of trying to enjoy the last chapter of his life. It’s a common thing that people get depressed once they retire.”
But with Wikingsson crammed into a back seat, a camera crew in lukewarm pursuit, and a reluctant Lars finally embracing the idea, this Last Journey became a road-trip-comedy-slash-doco-slash-episode of This is Your Life. It’s also a sometimes confronting portrayal of the frailties of old age, and about adult children trying to reconcile their elderly parents with the people they knew as kids.
Wikingsson: “I realised after a while that Filip thought he was making this trip for his dad’s benefit, but I realised that it’s as much his dad making the trip for Filip’s benefit, because Filip thinks that, ‘I want my dad to experience these things one last time,’ like a reverse bucket list, but it’s also Filip desperately wanting to experience them one last time.”
Hammar: “I really thought I could reverse time.”
The Last Journey is now the highest-grossing documentary in Swedish cinema history. Which means more Swedes have paid to see a film about Lars Hammar than they did about Prime Minister Olof Palme, Ingrid Bergman, or footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović. It was also the country’s submission for international film at this year’s Academy Awards but didn’t progress to a nomination. Ironically, given the film’s domestic success and now international release, their idea didn’t impress the country’s film funding body at first. “We sought a grant from the Swedish Film Institute, because that’s a nice help if you want to get going,” says Wikingsson. “But we got a flat, hard no. They even thought we’d made a successful film before … in the email to us, they said, ‘We’re not interested because this documentary seems to contain elements of humour.’” Which, to them, was unfathomable. “To me, that seems like 1937.”
Hammar: “There are lots of documentaries that have no comedy from Sweden.
Wikingsson: “That is a real tradition. So, we’re trailblazers.”
Before this Zoom interview with the pair while they are on a promotional tour in Australia, there’s a request from the film’s distributors that it not be described as a documentary, which is possibly more to do with marketing than accuracy.
But it does do some non-doco staged things, which might recall the pair’s roots in goofy television.
Wikingsson: “We just thought, we can do whatever we want, as long as we’re honest to the viewers that this is a staged thing. Let’s see what happens. We love Werner Herzog and he’s very open with his documentaries being staged. Occasionally, you just want to tell a story, so it doesn’t matter what you call it.”
It became Wikingsson’s job to show the finished film to Lars after his son kept putting it off.
Wikingsson: “Lars was glued to the screen for 90 minutes, and then he turned to me and he said, ‘This movie has class.’ I think he was a little surprised by the ambition of it, the bigness of it. We really wanted it to almost feel like a biopic, in a way, even though it’s very much a road trip, but it’s also a portrayal of a very kind man and the good things he’s done in life.”
How is the now 82-year-old these days? “I would lie if I said that everything is perfect. But he’s not unhappy, and he’s looked back at this trip and he’s like ‘Wow, I’m happy that I did it,” says Hammar.
The Last Journey is in cinemas from March 6.
