Une fleur à la bouche

A Flower in the Mouth

The beauty of flowers is generally thought of as bringing joy. Not so in this melancholy film, which uses them to talk about illness, impending calamity and death, taking a two-pronged approach to this end. There is the documentary observation of the hustle and bustle at a flower market in the Dutch town of Aalsmeer, where each day millions of cut flowers are flown in from Africa, sorted, grouped into bunches in a fully automated process, transported in cage trolleys through huge halls and sold on a large scale, showing flowers as objects of global trade and making the ecological insanity of their industrial exploitation all too clear.

A fictional scenario is then placed alongside it, freely adapted from Luigi Pirandello's 1923 play about the man with the flower in his mouth, a metaphorical reference to a tumour. The question of individual fate in the face of mortality thus comes into sharper focus. In a conversation with a stranger at a bar in Paris, the precise observation of everyday details and the power of words and the imagination are revealed as the man’s strategies for staying connected to life. The same applies both to him and today's global crises: time is running out.

Source: 72. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)