A filmmaker’s quest to help his ageing father regain his lost spark

Filip Hammar’s father Lars retired when he was 66. He taught French to high-school students for 40 years – not just the nuts and bolts of language, but all about French food and culture, including getting the class to sing his favourite songs by Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens. At the end of each graduating year, he would famously do a celebratory tap dance for his departing students. He did it again the day he left the school, looking forward to more Gallic fun. “The French call it ‘le troisieme age’ – ‘the third age’,” he said in his farewell speech, filmed by one of his students for posterity. “I hope it starts the second I walk out the door.”

But it didn’t. Instead, Lars Hammar sank into his easy chair and started developing a smorgasbord of ailments. “He had these dreams of, ‘I’m going to go to France, I’m going to drink wine!’ which proves you need a more solid plan,” says Filip Hammar. Without a purpose to each day, he became increasingly depressed. “Right after that retirement, he started picking the songs for his funeral,” says his son. “It started out as a joke and then it became reality. He still does it.” By the time Lars was 80, he was a frail old man whose first response to any suggestion was “no”.

So Filip Hammar decided, in consultation with his lively mother Tiina, to stage an intervention. He would take his father on a road trip from Stockholm to the south of France, book the same apartment in Beaulieu-sur-Mer where they used to have family holidays and try to recapture the times his dad loved best. “My grand plan was to substantially change him,” says Hammar. “I wanted him to become the person he once was. Now it sounds such a naive idea, but you don’t want to accept your parents are getting older.”

Filip Hammar is famous in Sweden as one of half of Filip and Fredrik, television presenters who make travel programs and interview their odder countrymen while swapping jokes: think the Leyland Brothers, but with a wacky Scandi edge. Hammar met Fredrik Wikingsson when they were both newspaper journalists; they have been best friends and creative partners for 20 years. Wikingsson knows Lars well. They decided that he should come along on the trip to France. They also decided they should film it.

The result is The Last Journey, a moving, funny documentary that has broken attendance records in Sweden, run continuously in cinemas for the best part of a year and was the country’s entry for this year’s Oscars. “We’ve mainly done stuff about other people, so we were hesitant at first,” says Wikingsson. “Was this like a vanity thing? What would people’s reaction be? ‘Good for them, they made a trip, why the f— do we care?’ So we were very nervous about that.” As it turned out, the whole of Sweden seemed to think it was about them too.

The filmmakers planned a few plot points. Hammar bought an orange Renault 4 like the one his father drove in the ’80s. Lars Hammar always found French road rage entertaining, so Wikingsson hired actors to stage a fight over parking they could watch from a cafe, much to the old man’s glee.

Somehow, they commandeered a beach cinema to show him a series of tributes from his former students, a wonderful moment. But they also had to roll with the punches: Lars falling over in his hotel room and having to go to hospital, for example, or the crunch that came when he was about to recreate his “famous ratatouille” and found that he no longer had the strength to cut up an eggplant.

Of course, Lars was thoroughly dubious about the whole idea at the outset. As the two younger men bundled him into the front seat of the Renault, he looked very ready to get out again. In the end, however, he actually enjoyed the process. “He was a teacher for 40 years, and he really liked being in front of his students,” says Wikingsson, “so I think the ‘being on camera’ thing was surprisingly natural for him. It was like an extra pair of ears. Because Filip is not the greatest of listeners, but the camera was always there, listening.”