Human Flow­ers of Flesh – first-look review

There’s some­thing whol­ly intox­i­cat­ing and immer­sive to Ger­man film­mak­er Hele­na Wittman’s awe­some­ly-named sec­ond fea­ture, Human Flow­ers of Flesh – a tow­er­ing, tee­ter­ing and exquis­ite­ly-wrought puz­zle box whose every shot invites the view­er to play a game of cool sub­tex­tu­al interpretation.

And if that sounds like ardu­ous work, it real­ly isn’t, as there’s implic­it dra­ma that emanates from the edits, the fram­ings and the mussy tex­ture of the (most­ly) 16mm images, where the form itself is inte­gral to any mean­ing you might glean. It’s a film which asks the ques­tion: what am I? Can you guess? And in its slow­burn and gor­geous­ly opaque nar­ra­tive, one which is pow­ered as much by lit­er­ary, polit­i­cal, geo­graph­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal digres­sion as it is the unspo­ken desires of its core cast, you can trans­pose the feel­ings and ideas that fit the best, and then work from there. To each, this is a per­son­al jour­ney of mind, body and soul.

As it’s such a tough one to describe, I’d say it’s a bit like Ger­man exper­i­men­tal film­mak­er Angela Schan­elec remak­ing the 2003 sea­far­ing epic, Mas­ter and Com­man­der, in that it is set pri­mar­i­ly on a boat which is sail­ing from Mar­seille to Cor­si­ca in the name of an ethe­re­al and intu­itive expe­di­tion insti­gat­ed by unsmil­ing ship’s cap­tain Ida (Ange­li­ki Papoulia).

She over­sees a crew of men, some surly, some wide-eyed, each from a dif­fer­ent coun­try across the globe. Most if not all of the few dia­logue scenes in the film are deliv­ered in a dif­fer­ent lan­guage – and in some cas­es, mul­ti­ple at the same time.

Despite an inter­est in study­ing and pre­serv­ing the col­lect­ed flo­ra and fau­na of the glis­ten­ing Mediter­ranean, Ida charts a course for one-time French Legion­naire head­quar­ters Sidi-Bel-Abbes in Alge­ria upon hap­pen­ing across a base and hear­ing the siren chant of a march­ing song. What actu­al­ly dri­ves her mis­sion remains unspo­ken, even among her crew. Yet as with the arc of the film itself, she is pulled by the nat­ur­al mag­net­ism of adven­ture and dis­cov­ery. As much as Human Flow­ers of Flesh presents itself as an art film, it also decon­structs and dis­man­tles the con­ven­tions of the sea­far­ing epic, not least the inher­ent claus­tro­pho­bia and inte­ri­or reflec­tion that comes from wide-open spaces.

In between the spar­tan exchanges and enthused poet­ry read­ings by the crew, Wittman leans on sun-bleached atmos­pher­ics, and her pri­mal images and per­cus­sive sound design cap­ture the eerie tran­quil­li­ty of life on a schooner. Wittman (who also worked as cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er on the film) inter­spers­es the ​“action” with a series of emo­tion­al­ly ener­vat­ing and hyp­not­ic shots of the sea and waves lap­ping against the shore, lulling us back and forth into a dream­state befit­ting of this strange voy­age. There’s some­thing of an anti-pre­ci­sion to her fram­ing, where every­thing is just a tiny bit off, where you have to work to under­stand what you’re look­ing at and why – it all feeds into Wittman’s minute­ly-cal­i­brat­ed and all-envelop­ing cin­e­mat­ic challenge.

At var­i­ous points, there are ref­er­ences to the colo­nial-ques­tion­ing works of Claire Denis (quite a lit­er­al and ful­some nod to be hon­est) and the lay­ered and tem­po­ral­ly-explod­ed lit­er­ary and film out­put of Mar­guerite Duras (her 1952 nov­el, ​‘The Sailor from Gibral­tar’ is quot­ed). It’s hard to know whether these are straight-up homages, or light­hous­es on the coast­line to illu­mi­nate our paths. Though con­sid­er­ing the film’s immer­sive con­tin­u­um of images and ideas, it’s like­ly going to be the latter.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, month­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.