Human Flowers of Flesh Review: Spinning an Inscrutable Reverie for Its Own Sake

There’s an emptiness to Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh that no amount of striking cinematography, thematic suggestion, and allusions to Jean Painlevé can disguise. The film is less a cohesive or compelling narrative feature than an exercise in elusiveness, with a procession of predominantly maritime imagery that loosely stitches together philosophical reflections on the relationship between humans, myth, plants, and water. It’s the sort of stiff, academically minded European art movie that so refuses, and seems to hold in contempt, dialogue exchange and narrative momentum that it verges on self-parody.

Human Flowers of Flesh plays out a long way from cause and effect, and at a frustrating remove, sometimes literally so. Take a scene in which Ida (Angeliki Papoulia), a ship captain whose name isn’t said until more than halfway into the film’s runtime, swims and floats near her boat in the Mediterranean Sea. The camera then plunges underwater to regard algae and corals formations before cutting to her small crew of men—all unnamed throughout the film—as they sit on board aimlessly fiddling with various photographs and letters.

Wittman denies her characters interiority, locating them in moments in which they express little and consciously discover or discuss even less. When someone does speak, it’s for the purpose of having some subtextual possibility pulse on the surface of the film, such as a mention of Medusa. At one point, one male character offers up a brief history of the Algerian city of Sidi Bel Abbès into his phone as a voice memo, and it sounds as if he’s reading from a Wikipedia page.

Through bits and pieces of information scattered between lengthy, dialogue-free sessions of oceanic and landscape imagery, it becomes semi-clear that Ida and her crew are traveling from Marseilles to Algeria, given their interest in the French Foreign Legion. It’s then that Human Flowers of Flesh reaches its climax and, almost improbably, makes its allegiance to Beau Travail cloyingly explicit with the appearance of a man—played by Denis Lavant and credited as Galoup (the name of his character in the Claire Denis film)—who leads Ida from outside a Sidi Bel Abbès café back to his place, where he juggles eggs and sings a legionnaire song.

Throughout Human Flowers of Flesh, one gets the sense that Wittmann is confusing the mere act of deconstruction with grandiose thinking. The film revels in vague metaphorical suggestions about being adrift or lost at sea, and it invokes French colonialism as a buzzword—that is, without delving into its complex history. Much like its title, Human Flowers of Flesh strains so hard for abstract poetic significance that by the conclusion, as a random burst of electronic music plays over a long shot of a desert-scape, Wittmann even manages to soil, by association, Lavant’s immortal dance during the end credits of Denis’s masterwork.