In Susan Sontag’s cautionary tale-cum-oft-cited 1978 work of critical theory, “Illness as Metaphor”, the illustrious essayist somewhat ironically begins with a metaphor before proceeding to outline the pitfalls of doing so. “Illness is the night-side of life…” is the opening phrase in a text exploring (and deploring) historical and contemporary clichés, stigmas, romanticisms, and florid language fastened to tuberculosis and cancerous tumours, all the while adhering to the harsh reality that splits life along a dichotomous line between health and illness like a Janus-faced coin. A “more onerous citizenship” is how Sontag’s bluntly assesses life on flip side, the nocturnal side.
Delving right into the heart of the matter—illness as metaphor—but also throwing its romanticism to the wind by way of radical juxtaposition, Éric Baudelaire’s beguiling, latest feature UNE FLEUR À LA BOUCHE (A Flower in the Mouth) formally enacts a division elaborated from Luigi Pirandello’s allegorically titled 1923 play, “L'Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca”, and a literal rendering of its suggestive symbol through observational style documentary. A diptych and a two-hander as much as an essay and a fiction, UNE FLEUR À LA BOUCHE employs dialectics to suture memory and experience, as well as projections and prognostics along a time-space continuum that includes our present, perpetually plague-filled existence.
A diptych and a two-hander as much as an essay and a fiction, UNE FLEUR À LA BOUCHE employs dialectics to suture memory and experience.
The film begins on a Parisian winter’s evening where dusk has come early and the shops are still open but nearing closing time. From outside a store window, a man observes a woman meticulously wrapping a present with crisp decorative paper before he strolls down a sparsely-populated street, umbrella in hand. An abrupt cut to a red rose standing upright immediately conjures a different location, one in which the expectations for narrative soon give way to a documentary portrait of labour and its gruelling, yet mesmeric rhythms.
The Flower
Prelude and credits aside, the first part of UNE FLEUR À LA BOUCHE takes place in a vast hangar—the world’s largest flower market in Aalsmeer, Holland—as the film charts a choreography of picking, pruning, packaging, pushing, and selling, a circuit of manual and industrial labour performed under harsh fluorescents. The brusque repetitive tasks belie the fragility of what is being handled: flowers farmed and flown in from Africa and South America to be auctioned off in this sterile, globalized marketplace. “Enjoy Life, Love Lilies” is cheerily emblazoned upon a plastic wrapper as the yet-to-bloom specimens are tightly packed and jostled onto a metal trolley. (Their funereal associations may resonate for some, further adding to the sense of disorientation.) A mechanized system guides the flower-filled gurneys through the warehouse as they crash themselves into waiting positions like bumper cars, a supremely surreal and somewhat comical sight as the inherent contradiction between beauty and violence is subsumed into these kinetic, wraithlike displays.
The constant whirring and musique concrète-like sounds emitted from the flower factory are accompanied by an array of fascinating faces who are slightly worn, concentrated, and focused on the repeated tasks at hand, aware of and largely unperturbed by the camera’s gaze. The camera lingers on a number of them, as much as on the imported product and the machines, as cyclical patterns emerge—from gestures to rows to conveyor belts, to a man’s constant calling out the names of species at auction.
This section of UNE FLEUR À LA BOUCHE is a rigorous addition to the august lineage of factory films and industrial portraits, its seemingly delicate merchandise, alive but its days numbered, a surprising clash of sensibilities that bespeaks so much about today’s global, paradoxical exploits reaped from a living, breathing planet both run amok and on the verge of collapse. A growing sense of unease accrues as the bustle and bulk evince a never-ending loop, in which time is perhaps inevitably, ultimately, and depressingly beholden to economic forces. This latter concern has become accentuated today as a large part of the population has been expected to work during a global pandemic, where so many have been forced to risk their lives in order to fuel the mechanisms of consumer capitalism. The fear of a broken supply chain has signalled the worst in a diseased world, which frequently values and prioritizes profit over human life. But who doesn’t love flowers?
After dark
Back to the “night-side of life”, UNE FLEUR À LA BOUCHE switches gears entirely to focus on the striking man seen in the opening sequence, who, after intently watching shop owners pack up their merchandise for the day, settles into a bar near the train station. This fictional observer, with his heightened attention absorbed by (and admiring of) the exacting, repetitive gestures and minutia of work, bookends the documentary footage—an unexpected framing device that serves to heighten the film’s pathos and magnetize its fission. This enigmatic figure (played with eloquent intensity by French rapper and musician Oxmo Puccino) encounters a wide-eyed, timid stranger (Dali Benssalah) who has narrowly missed his train and plans to while the hours away drinking blue lagoons, a sweet, artificial looking cocktail entirely out of place in this bar du coin near Gare de l’Est. With its golden glow, the bar is a shimmering box, whose sense of containment also harbours a distinct artifice—aided on cue by the sound of mandolin wafting in from the street, a carry-over from the Pirandello play from which this second part is liberally adapted .
In Baudelaire’s film, this nocturnal, largely huis-clos meeting between a man whose days are numbered and one who seemingly has all the time in the world oscillates between connection and distance.
On its own, this second act hews to its source inspiration and is theatrical in nature, with a steady stream of monologues. The main protagonist is hyper-perceptive and a good judge of character, his verbosity matched by his affability and perhaps also a need for kinship. Yet his almost invasive curiosity and sharing stems from the urgency of his condition: of the eponymous flower in his mouth. In Pirandello’s play (notably written in the aftermath of the Spanish flu) that flower was an epithelioma, an incurable tumour, whose spectre of death alters the man’s relationship to life all around him. In Baudelaire’s film, this nocturnal, largely huis-clos meeting between a man whose days are numbered and one who seemingly has all the time in the world oscillates between connection and distance, a study in contrasts—but also grief for all the wonders in the world set to expire.
A meditation on disease and death as much as life’s possibilities and human accountability, UNE FLEUR À LA BOUCHE is conceptually and thematically resonant in a world where nothing is really as it seems, and in which shifting, dizzying perceptions have infected our sense of certainty, YOLO aside. Working again with his gifted, regular collaborators, editor Claire Atherton and director of photography Claire Mathon—both of whom previously collaborated on 2019’s UN FILM DRAMATIQUE and ALSO KNOWN AS JIHADI from 2017—Baudelaire continues to experiment with and evolve his cinema, further blurring the line between subjective and ‘objective’ viewpoints. UNE FLEUR À LA BOUCHE evinces elegant symmetries throughout, which cleverly coax aesthetic coherence through dissonance, but also dares to mix metaphors. Sometimes roses are red and violets are blue lagoons.
Andréa Picard is an independent curator and writer, and a Senior Film Programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival.
