Une fleur à la bouche

Most great films either let us see the world as if for the first time or make us aware that we might just be looking at something we will never see again. Éric Baudelaire’s diptych belongs to both categories at the same time. In the first act, the filmmaker observes the industrial processes at a flower market in Aalsmeer, the largest of its kind. It’s a fascinating ballet of packaging and transporting, only interrupted by the people on the telephones who design the bouquets requested on flickering computer screens: a battle zone of capitalistic absurdity selling manufactured symbols of love.
In the second act, fiction settles in, as Baudelaire freely adapts Luigi Pirandello’s 1923 play about a man dying of an epithelioma. When the film’s protagonist meets a stranger in a nocturnal bar, he begins to tell him about the things he notices in everyday life: a couple behind a window, the chairs in waiting rooms, the anonymous wrapping of gifts, the barman. His monologue is the desperate attempt of a dying man to cling to life. However, it is also a shimmering call for the art of perception in a world of contradictions. Whenever we truly look at things, we can finally discover life again. We can see the flowers behind their packages. (Patrick Holzapfel)

In the presence of Éric Baudelaire.

Éric Baudelaire: L’ANABASE DE MAY ET FUSAKO SHIGENOBU, MASAO ADACHI ET 27 ANNÉES SANS IMAGES (2011), THE UGLY ONE (2013), LETTERS TO MAX (2014), ALSO KNOWN AS JIHADI (2017), UN FILM DRAMATIQUE (2019), WHEN THERE IS NO MORE MUSIC TO WRITE, AND OTHER ROMAN STORIES (2022)