Floral bouquets are associated love and death.
They are the tools of both courtship and mourning. That Ying and Yang can
clearly be seen in Spain’s official foreign language submission to the 88th
Academy Awards, Basque filmmakers Jon Garaño & Jose
Mari Goenaga’s Flowers (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
Ane Goñi has just
been diagnosed with menopause, but she takes it rather stoically. It is just
one more disappointment in life, like her husband Ander, to whom she will not
bother passing on the news. However, shortly thereafter a big extravagant floral
arrangement is delivered—and it is not from Ander. Every week, a new bouquet
arrives, vexing her suddenly jealous husband.
Then one day, they suddenly stop,
simultaneously with the death of Beñat, a crane
operator with the construction company, where she works in clerical support. Of
course, it takes a while for Goñi to figure out the
connection, but when she does, she starts leaving weekly bouquets at the site
of Beñat’s auto accident, even though she hardly knew the man. Eventually,
Beñat’s widow Lourdes (now remarried) and his mother Tere discover Goñi’s weekly devotion, but their resulting reactions and assumptions
are drastically different.
Rarely, has a film about love and loss ever
been so rigorously unsentimental. Frankly, Beñat’s
anonymous flower deliveries were more than a little stalkerish, yet they did
bring some color into Ane’s relentlessly drab life. Indeed, all the character
are acutely human, living in a world largely indifferent to their existence. Garaño & Goenaga even mark the passage of time through the
disposition of Beñat’s body, which he donated to science, without consulting with his
family. While this is a rather morbid strategy at times, it still heightens the
sense of grand tragedy, somewhat in the tradition of the Japanese Oscar winner,
Departures.
Granted, Flowers
weaves together many tentative, almost fragmentary relationships, but Nagore
Aranburu’s wonderfully subtle and complex performance as Goñi helps sell most of them. (The truth is, people can become preoccupied
or even obsessed on the basis of very little.) Itziar Aizpuru is also terrific—and
ultimately heartbreaking—as Tere, the dreaded mother-in-law who repents too
late. However, the standoffish Lourdes is never fully fleshed out, leaving only
bitterness for the valiant Itziar Ituno to work with. Generally, men do not get
the prime cuts in Flowers, but as
Ander, Egoitz Lasa has at least one well-turned scene that challenges many audience
preconceptions.
