Writer: Brook Driver
Directors: Finn Bruce and Brook Driver
The most British film at the Raindance Film Festival if not of the entire year, Finn Bruce and Brook Driver’s Swede Caroline puts intrigue, sabotage and giant vegetable growing in the spotlight as a fictional documentary crew follow an entrant into a local competition. Its spoof style may not quite take home first prize nor can it quite sustain its essential silliness without some very dramatic plot leaps, but Swede Caroline is still a very entertaining debut.
Having been unfairly – in her view – disqualified from the giant marrow competition in 2017 over a hairline crack, Caroline is determined that 2018 will be her year. But her greenhouse is burgled and her private investigator friends are taken hostage leaving Caroline vulnerable. Expecting trouble, she allows a film crew to accompany her and supportive neighbours Willy and Paul in the weeks before the event, who get far more than they bargained for.
Not since Wallace and Gromit encountered the were-rabbit has competitive vegetable growing been so contentious, and while Swede Caroline doesn’t quite reach the dizzy comic heights of Aardman, there is plenty of fun to be had in the deep seriousness with which the characters take the business of giant veg. It is all quintessentially British and Co-Directors Bruce and Driver get considerable mileage from the lengths to which Driver’s creations will go to assure their place. That contrast between the sheer ridiculousness of the end goal and the espionage plot that leads to housebreaking, kidnapping and lots of driving dramatically around the countryside, motors the comedy as well as creating a convincing escalation of tension.
The mockumentary style is also really effective, giving a reason for characters to talk to camera and even to show off to it as their failure to recognise their own ridiculousness becomes increasingly comic. It would be nice to see more of the documentary crew reflecting on their footage in real time, however, which would enhance the nonsense of it all and make better use of this framing device, but Bruce and Driver marshal the silliness of middle aged people and their little kingdoms in interesting ways.
The film does lack context though, and a few attempts to suggest the wider lives of the characters, and of Caroline in particular, fall rather flat both as comedy and more emotional ranges. The brief inclusion of Caroline’s unseen ex-husband tries to make us empathise with her but it’s a subplot that ultimately contributes little while the swingers set she is involved with probably seemed like a good idea on paper but in practice feels weakly rendered.
Jo Hartley excels in a rare leading role as the titular Caroline with a very natural performance that suits the low-key style of the film. Caroline feels like a very real character, a convincingly lonely woman invested in her marrows and equally reliant and irritated by her friends. There is good support from Celyn Jones as Willy and Richard Lumsden as conspiracy theorist Paul determined to live off-grid as well as turns from Fay Ripley as a fellow gardener, Ray Fearon and Aisling Bea.
It would be hard to believe that growing veg could be so contentious but in Bruce and Driver’s film there’s a feeling that the Directors may even have played down the cut-throat business of earning that coveted victory. Swede Caroline may not be best in show but deserves a rosette all the same.
Swede Caroline is screening at the Raindance Film Festival 2022.
