If I were to sum up this wondrously dreamy doc in a couple of words, I would say it’s a hippie, trippy psychedelic cinematic joy of a film, and one you should not dare to miss.
OK, first things first. I abbreviated the above quote for obvious reasons, but Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s latest film is not a real, true blue documentary. It’s a dream of a film that takes the viewer down a pleasant rabbit hole of music, remembrances and poetry. And when you come up for air, just a short 75 minutes later, it makes you yearn to be loved, truly loved, as only we could ever have been loved in an age before the internet.
And I’ll explain that too. Nowadays, we put a heart next to anything and everything our friends and acquaintances post on social media. From kitty cats to political statements, it’s somehow all stuff we love. Yet gone are the days when love meant sitting down to write someone a letter, working on it physically and pouring into it our heart and soul. Because within those little masterpieces of letter-writing there was a whole universe of love, desire, loss, pain, joy, hunger and fear. Not quite what a clickable heart represents, and one that we may even have clicked on by mistake.
The premise of The Extraordinary Miss Flower is simple. When Geraldine Flower passed away, her daughter Zoe, a well-respected publicist and the producer of this doc, found a suitcase filled with letters. These were letters, and even telexes, from Geraldine’s lovers, scattered around the globe and all left lovelorn by Zoe’s mom. Instead of solving the puzzle of who her mom was, the letters added an extra layer to mystery to a woman who vowed, when told so by a magician in Ankara, to only know extraordinary people.
Zoe then shared the discovery with her friend, Icelandic singer Emiliana Torrini, who in turn turned the letters into songs. And those songs, naturally became an album, which I’ve shared with you below.
Funny thing is, when I sat down to watch the film, I realized I’d heard at least three of those songs before, including the iconic ‘Miss Flower’. It is part of the soundtrack of my life lately and I am not sure when that started to be. Maybe it’s one of those moments when a film has been in your subconscious and then, you finally manage to watch it and it feels like deja vu.
Throughout the documentary, the artists/filmmakers duo of Forsyth and Pollard keep us guessing, as they’ve done with most of their other films. The Extraordinary Miss Flower is not interested in giving us all the information we yearn for, especially from a fascinating Geraldine Flower, played by the cool Caroline Catz. BTW, Catz walked into our screening room before the start of the screening, when I watched the film at the BFI office, and hooked us into it even before it started. To publicists everywhere, I think that may be a cool new way to introduce press screenings… I’d certainly delight in that.
Instead of providing us with the answers, what the film does, smartly, is create more questions within us, about Miss Flower, the cool Miss Torrini and our own sense of loss. Loss of a time when love was something different — intense, powerfully invigorating and art-inspiring. And we talked to each other, or sat down to write letters, to prove it.
Torrini herself is spellbinding and utterly watchable. She is at the center of the film, surrounded by her musicians and sporting some Issey Miyake style clothing and talking straight to our hearts through her singing. She is joined by Geraldine, whose presence is enabled by the words of others. It’s a fascinating, and also scary thought, that once we will be gone, our lives, work and loves will be explained by the words of others — their memories of us and their interpretation of our presence on earth. That sends shivers down my spine but it is what happens. We’ve all seen it in the obituaries of famous people, those extensive and complicated lives they led condensed down to a few paragraphs praising them.
The women are also joined by some well known men in the film, among them British actor Richard Ayaode and Aussie musician Nick Cave, reading the letters sent by the lovers. And those letters then segue naturally into the lyrics and music of Torrini. The result: simple alchemic cinematic magic, if you ask me.
The Extraordinary Miss Flower is a BFI release and will open in UK cinemas on May 9th. You can book tickets for London through the BFI website.