Lilian T. Mehrel’s Honeyjoon opens with June (Ayden Mayeri) masturbating in a double bed in a hotel room. Before she can finish, though, her mother Lela (Amira Casar) returns from the bathroom. June pretends she’s just woken up. Then her mom announces that she’s been trying to poop but can’t because she’s constipated.
That witty exercise in contrasting frustrations neatly summarizes the characters and the conflict of the film’s 75 minutes. Lela’s husband and June’s father died a year ago of cancer; the two have traveled to the Azores to remember him. He’d traveled there after the death of his father, and had always hoped to return.
June sees the trip as a chance to enjoy herself and celebrate life, as she thinks her dad would’ve wanted—but her mother’s discomfort and mourning keep getting in the way. Lela’s stopped up with grief—at her husband’s death, the misogyny and oppression in her former homeland of Iran, and her inability to connect with her daughter. The film becomes a series of awkward interpersonal failures staged against the gorgeous backdrop of sea and salt and honeymoon luxury.
The honeymoon setting is the film’s way of twisting the knife; Lela and June booked a deal at their hotel without entirely realizing that low price was meant to attract newlyweds. That means they have to sleep in the same bed, are scheduled for a honeymoon massage together rather than for individual ones, and are surrounded by loving couples displaying various degrees of affection.
For Lela (a couples therapist), the canoodling all around her is a constant reminder that her husband isn’t there—even though she tries to dragoon a semi-horrified June into washing her back and cuddling with her in bed as a replacement. June’s reminded she’s single too, and her flirting with various hotel employees—especially surfer-dude tour guide João (José Condessa) makes Lela squirm and continually try to cover her up.
Many films would use this dynamic as an excuse for raunchy comedy and/or a series of big reversals and reveals. It’s to Mehrel’s credit that she understands the virtues of keeping a small film small. The sexuality is low-key and matter-of-fact; it can be uncomfortable, but it never strays anywhere near raunch-com territory. Similarly, when secrets come out, they’re ambivalent, obvious, and don’t change much—Lela’s happy husband wasn’t happy all the time, June maybe doesn’t speak Persian as well as she sometimes suggests she does.
Neither is there a clear or marked change in the relationship between Lela and June. They annoy each other at times and then sometimes support each other. They have moments of closeness where they’ve found a way to remember dad and husband together, and then moments of intense frustration when (as in that first scene) their efforts to grieve are designed to block and mortify one another.
Mehrel gives the two a lovely scene together towards the conclusion, suggesting that they’ve both found a more comfortable place with each other and with their grief. But the most powerful sequence in the film comes a little earlier, and occurs when mother and daughter are separated. Lela finds brief pleasure by herself; June, while pursuing her relationship with João, unlocks unexpected grief. The movie cuts back and forth between the two, suggesting that in exchanging approaches to mourning they’ve perhaps helped each other. But that exchange isn’t deliberate or conscious—though it may be facilitated by the fact that they’ve chosen to be together on the island, even though that togetherness is hard.
The movie ends with what appears to be video footage of Lela’s husband from his own trip to the Azores, standing in front of the temple that Lela and June visited, walking into the surf on the beach where they swam. He’s mostly out of frame and when you do glimpse him his face is turned away. His absence from his own film underlines and mirrors his absence from Honeyjoon itself. You learn little about him, except that Lela—perhaps wrongly—believes that June is like him in her pursuit of happiness.
One aspect of grief, the movie suggests, is that death forces you to confront not just the loss of what you know, but of what you didn’t—the portions of your loved one’s life that took place without you, in places you can’t and won’t go. June and Lela have come together in part to find what they’ve lost, and instead, for better and worse, they find each other. It’s a smart director who recognizes that in a movie about grief, it’s important to make your movie small enough that a lot of what matters is left out of frame.