Last Weekend with Jenny and John (2023)

Dad-life Crisis

“I don’t need no one to tell me about Heaven. I look at my daughter and I believe.”

—Live

The Oscars are next month, and I’ve just finished a marathon catch-up session. Most of the Best Picture contenders are over two hours long—many pushing three. Out of these, maybe two stirred my emotions to the point of wiping away tears in the same way that Jimmy Olsson’s latest short film, Last Weekend with Jenny and John (aka Sista helgen med Jenny och John), did. In just 16 minutes, this Swedish drama goes deeper into familial regrets, fears, and hopes than the exhausting and derivative Everything Everywhere All at Once , and presents us with a bona fide common man—a practically mythical creature in the pop discussion, and one completely missing from the stagey polemic Women Talking (wherein every guy is either a Mennonite Harvey Weinstein or Ben Whishaw’s human waterworks).

Jenny (Gry Eriksson) is a preteen basketball star whose team has been invited to play a rival school out of town. Instead of traveling with her friends, she agrees to stay with her father, John (Mattias Nordkvist), at a hotel near the venue. They have dinner, lounge in the room, and try to engage in conversation—no easy feat, considering Jenny is constantly on her phone. For his part, John nudges his daughter, trying to give her the space to grow up, while desperately wanting to be as interesting as the friends she engages with through the screen (he even brings her favorite teddy bear on the trip, a totally lame and wholly realistic “Dad” move).

Things come to a head when Jenny indulges John’s request to spend an afternoon in a park, which, for her, is an infinitely boring chore. Olsson shoots both actors from behind and at a considerable distance from up on a hill. It’s as if, in an unwitting homage to It’s A Wonderful Life, we’re already seeing John’s interpretation of this memory and of the petulant behavior that he’ll shamefully revisit for years to come.

Since the movie is barely a quarter of an hour long, I won’t divulge much else about the plot. Suffice it to say there are two instances in which Olsson tinkers with sitcom-level predicaments (one involving The Big Game, and the other a confused dad staring down a supermarket wall of feminine hygiene products), and emerges victorious with real reactions and even more real emotions.

I don’t know if Olsson and Nordkvist are fathers, but both writer/director and actor nail the undercurrent of pride, fear, and protectiveness that runs through most dads’ veins. John is neither a chauvinistic alpha male nor a spineless worrywart who lets people run him over. He’s just a guy trying to inspire his kid to be the best she can be and fluff up her wings on the way to leaving the next, all the while clinging clumsily to the little girl who doesn’t need him in some key ways that she used to. John receives a troubling phone call midway through the film, and Nordkvist masterfully captures the body language of a problem-solver springing to life—problems that may be painful to him personally, but which he’ll do his damnedest to shield Jenny from.

For her part, Eriksson plays Jenny as a recognizably good kid. She’s neither precocious nor mean, and she doesn’t talk in meme-speak. She stands up for herself, and isn’t afraid to talk plainly about what she wants. She’s also grown enough to admit that getting what she wants isn’t always a great thing. It’s easy to look at Last Weekend as a character study of Nordkvist’s John, but it’s Jenny (and Eriksson’s understated performance of big moments) that gives the film its center.

I’ll be thinking of this movie on Oscars night, as deluded Hollywood-types pretend that Top Gun: Maverick or Avatar 2 belong in any “Year’s Best” categories (beyond technical considerations, maybe). This time next year I would love to find myself rooting for Olsson’s Last Weekend, a short film that’s long on impact.

Last Weekend with Jenny and John will debut this weekend at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.