Last year, a Joel-less Ethan Coen, of the Coen brothers, made a film called Drive-Away Dolls. It was his first solo feature (save a documentary on Jerry Lee Lewis), though he wasn’t really solo at all, since he worked in close collaboration with his wife Tricia Cooke, on a film heavily informed by her experiences as a queer woman.
A sex comedy about two lesbians on the run with a suitcase full of dildos, Drive-Away Dolls established a new flavour of the Coen-esque – still dark, funny, and curious about human nature, but also a littler breezier and voraciously horny, in ways you could choose to solely credit to Cooke, to a liberated Coen, or to a (likely) combination of both. Coen and Cooke are credited as co-writers and, while he’s credited as sole director, they’ve clarified in interviews that they share responsibilities across the board.
