C.‘is another film (besides Farewell Leonora by Paolo Taviani, the only Italian film in competition) inspired by Luigi Pirandello at the Berlinale. IS Une fleur à la bouche by Éric Baudelaire, at the Forum. Baudelaire, who is an artist and a filmmaker, has made films that have passed through major film festivals (Rotterdam, Locarno, Marseille) and installations for galleries and museums in 15 years. During a stay in Japan he realized one of his best known films, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi & 27 Years without Images, in which the history of the Japanese Red Army is told like an anabasis, an uncertain wandering that ultimately results in a journey home. The narrative voices are those of May Shigenobu, daughter of the founder of the Japanese Red Army, clandestine in Lebanon until the age of 27, and of Masao Adachi, a Japanese experimental director who joined the Japanese Red Army. In that film Baudelaire for the first time puts into practice the “landscape theory” (fûkeiron in Japanese) by Masao Adachiaccording to which the camera is turned not towards the subject of the film but towards the landscapes in which the subject lived.
The Aalsmeer refrigerator in the Netherlands.
Traces of it are also found in this film which premiered in Berlin, but which in the form of an installation, broken down into its parts, had already been shown at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. For three years Baudelaire filmed the frantic hustle and bustle in Europe’s largest refrigerator in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands, where forty-six million flowers, mostly from Africa and South America, are selected, packaged and auctioned every day. Baudelaire’s camera captures the flawless movement of men and machines in the gigantic hangar and the bureaucratic routine of the employees at the Dutch flower exchange. An uninterrupted cycle, an efficient industry that shows a reality apparently alien to flowers, to the role that over time has been attributed to them, that of vectors for the expression of affection, compassion, participation. On this first part of the film, almost hypnotic, a second part is grafted, of fiction very directly inspired by the one-act Pirandello.
Oxmo Puccino, the man with a flower in his mouth.
A man, Oxmo Puccino, a regular at a bar open all night near a train station, meets another, Dali Benssalah, who has missed the last train and has to pass the time waiting for the first train the next morning. The conversation between the two starts from worldly, casual matters, but slowly proceeds along more intimate tracks until reaching the final revelation. that it is indeed that of death that has laid its gaze on the habitual customer, just by putting a flower in his mouth (of epithelioma one died at the time of Pirandello), but also that of human strategies to stay in touch with lifethe observation of everyday details (a woman who carefully prepares a package in a shop, a couple who quarrels and then makes love in one of the apartments in front of the bar) and consequently the power of words, of communication between individuals and that of gaze and imagination prove to be the only antidotes to the inexorable passage of time.
When the two men separate and shortly after morning, the traffic of the city, and with it life, after the night break, resumes. Along a sidewalk, strangers gather to wait for the bus that will take them to work, to the various tasks of the day: combining the ways of documentary and fictional cinema, using the flower as a connection between two places, two worlds, Baudelaire urges us to reflect on the mysterious relationship between our (precarious) existential condition and the infrastructures of the globalized economy. In the words of the author: “This film is a work on disease, 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 disease as a metaphor for the impact of man on the planet, producing both beauty and destruction. Pirandello wrote the play shortly after the Spanish flu. I discovered it in the 90s and at the time I wanted to adapt it into an AIDS movie. It took me 20 years to get the project started, and then COVID-19 gave it another dimension. But whenever reality meets the text, its literary and philosophical depth allows us to transcend the news and tragedies of the moment. Beyond sickness and death, this is a film about life ».
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