Luigi Pirandello’s original play, "L'Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca" (1922), is set in a railway station where a man with an incurable disease encounters a stranger. The flower at the corner of the protagonist’s mouth is an epithelioma, a tumour that was a death sentence in Pirandello’s time. The stranger awaits the morning train to return home to the countryside, gnawed by the small worries and setbacks of a day in the city. The protagonist is sitting in a café that he frequents every night because it never closes. He is passing the time he has left, and with the consciousness of his imminent death grows a burning desire to observe the life around him, to feel it, projecting himself through his conversation with the stranger into the minute details of a world he scrutinizes intensely as a way of escaping his pending fate.
To adapt this piece to the present I imagined a dual structure that is part observational documentary, part fiction. The first act is an intense dive into the frantic rhythm of the world’s largest flower market in Aalsmeer, Holland. This extended documentary prelude sets the stage for a very personal second act unfolding at night, culminating with a long conversation in a café adapted from Pirandello’s play.
UNE FLEUR À LA BOUCHE (A Flower in the Mouth) is a work about illness, both real and metaphorical: the certainty of death as a reality that forces us to rethink our relationship with the world of the living, but also illness as a metaphor for man’s impact on the planet, producing both beauty and destruction. Pirandello wrote the play shortly after the Spanish flu. I discovered it in the 1990s, and at the time I wanted to adapt it into a film about AIDS. It took me 20 years to get the project started, and then Covid-19 gave it yet another dimension. But every time reality catches up with the text, its literary and philosophical depth allows it to transcend the news and tragedies of the moment. Beyond disease and death, it is a film about life.
Éric Baudelaire
