Honey Don't!

“People like shit,” mutters Ethan Coen, quoting Miles Davis from a hotel room overlooking the French Riviera. Slouched in his chair, somewhere between bemused and beaten, he lets his wife and creative partner, Tricia Cooke, do most of the talking. They’re in Cannes with their new film, Honey Don’t!, out of competition and on the midnight fringes.

It’s difficult to reconcile this Ethan Coen with the one— well, half of the duo— who redefined American cinema with Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men. Those films bent genre, turned banter into poetry, and irony into philosophy. They didn’t just become cult classics, but sometimes proper religions (Dudeism). Honey Don’t, by contrast, feels like the ghost of a once-brilliant voice: stripped of style, drained of substance, and devoid of spark. The virtuoso camera work is gone. So are the quirky compositions and signature rhythms. In their place: flat centre-framing, a generic ad-like aesthetic, and a joyless attempt at pulp pastiche. It’s a B-movie without bite.

This marks Ethan’s second outing with Cooke after the spectacularly limp Drive-Away Dolls. Once teased as part of a “lesbian road movie trilogy,” the series now seems more like a vague notion than a cohesive vision. There are hopes for a third chapter, but no concrete plans. “Then you need to go and do the third movie,” Coen shrugs. “We need to go figure out what it is.”

Margaret Qualley leads Honey Don’t as a hyper-feminine, rockabilly private eye, equal parts Lauren Bacall and cartoon pin-up, swaggering through the story with arched eyebrows and hard-boiled flair. Aubrey Plaza plays her love interest with deadpan cool, while Chris Evans appears as a dodgy cult leader who preaches in baffling macaroni metaphors. The film aims to queer up the traditionally macho noir template; a noble ambition, but one that never truly takes root. The subversion is surface-level, and the genre commentary lands with a shrug.

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is cited as a key influence, though the resemblance feels aspirational at best. Where Altman’s film swayed with jazz-inflected melancholy and sly revisionism, Honey Don’t! flails in tonal confusion. It never quite commits to noir, comedy, or camp, instead floating awkwardly in a limbo of cringe. “It’s a detective story,” Cooke offers plainly. “It’s serious.” Coen adds: “If people laugh, that doesn’t make it a comedy. But if they laugh, at least it’s working somehow.”

Offscreen, the creative ambivalence lingers. “It’s getting harder and harder to get the money to make a new project unless you’re doing a studio movie,” Coen laments. “In the ’90s, the movie business could afford to flush money to fringe characters like us. Now it’s changed.” The remark hangs in the air like a weary sigh—a quiet concession that their era of creative carte blanche may be behind them.

And yet, Cooke remains animated. She handles the press with assurance, defending their shared vision. “The credits are artificial,” she says. “It was always collaborative.” Coen nods in agreement. “It’s very similar to how I worked with Joel.” It takes two to tango... but choose the wrong partner, and you’ll be dancing in circles.

Speaking of Joel— yes, they’re still close. A new script they wrote together is apparently ready and waiting. “We want to do it,” Ethan says. “But he’s tied to something else right now. It’d be stimulating to reunite.”

For now, though, Honey Don’t! stands as a strange detour. “It’s escapism,” Coen shrugs. “Movies are fun to watch. They lift you out of reality. And we’re not trying to make a social commentary here.”

And maybe that’s the point. Honey Don’t! doesn’t strive to say anything. It just... exists. Whether it works or not?

Well, as Coen reminds us: “People like shit.”