Flora and Son

There's not a great deal of plausibility with this story, but I still really quite enjoyed it. "Flora" (Eve Hewson) has a sort of hate/hate relationship with her pretty wayward fourteen year old lad "Max" (Orén Kinlan) as she struggles to make ends meet while his dad "Ian" (Jack Reynor) has shacked up with his new, pseudo-Spanish, girlfriend. "Max" is a typical unruly kid: into petty theft, a girl who isn't going to look at him twice and "Flora" is at her wits end. Returning from work one afternoon she espies a busted guitar in a skip. €18 after she has tied a ribbon to it and presented it to him as a belated birthday gift. He's not remotely interested so she decides to try her hand and eventually alights on the less geeky, dashing, "Jeff" (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) - an online guitar teacher from California. It's their relationship that gradually helps her to put her more immediate difficulties into better perspective and to begin to find more common ground with "Max" and with her ex (on whom she is still a bit sweet). I found there to be a great dynamic between Hewson and Kinlan - though I'm not sure I'd ever have spoken to my mother, nor she to me, in quite this lively vernacular! It's a story that's full of anger and resentment, but also of humour and, in a slightly unique sort of fashion, affection too. Reynor is little more than eye candy - no bad thing - but I could have been doing with a little more from him, and from an acoustically talented JG-L who wrote a few of the songs and performed them - as do the others - too. It's a character study, this film - rough round the edges and maybe just a bit far-fetched, but great use is made of what must have been a tiny production budget to focus the emphasis of the story on the really quite likeable characterisations. Maybe it didn't need a cinema outing, but it is well worth a watch.