A Flower in the Mouth (Éric Baudelaire, 2022) (Patreon)

The more films I see by Éric Baudelaire, the less I understand what he's up to. They all seem so different, from his look at the breakaway republic of Abkhazia (2014's Letter to Max), to his riff on Masao Adachi (2017's Also Known as Jihadi), to his recent Vardaesque collaboration with French schoolchildren, Un Film Dramatique (2019). None of them look alike, and none of them exhibits a clear directorial signature. What they do share, I suppose, is a conceptual approach, whereby the filmmaker adopts a given set of intellectual parameters and sees them through on their own terms. 

A Flower in the Mouth is one of two featurettes Baudelaire debuted last year, the other being his archival examination of the Red Brigades, When There Is No More Music to Write. While A Flower in the Mouth is the most unambiguously fictional work he has attempted in quite some time, Baudelaire doesn't seem interested in making a straightforward "dramatic film." And while I am not entirely certain that this diptych really works the way Baudelaire wants it to, I approve of its aims enough to give it my appreciation.

Following a brief introductory passage, where we see the film's lead actor (Oxmo Puccino) watching through a shop window as a woman giftwraps a package, Baudelaire engulfs us in the daily goings-on of a flower processing firm in the Netherlands. It is an automated marketplace where cut flowers are bundled, wrapped, and shipped out to various buyers, most of whom seem to place orders to a dedicated phone bank. This twenty-minute segment owes quite a lot to Harun Farocki -- how many times have I typed that phrase this year? -- but lacks both the elegance and intensive gaze of his best documentaries.

Then, we return to Puccino, who has stopped into a bar for a nightcap. There he meets a stranger (Dali Benssalah) who missed his train and has to kill several hours in Paris. Puccino's conversation with the man is essentially a dramatic monologue, as he explains his nightly habit of watching people in the street, observing them and imagining the circumstances of their lives. We soon learn that this man doesn't have long to live, and is determined to spend his remaining days taking in as much ambient humanity as he possibly can. The stilted dramaturgy of this segment recalls late Oliveira, although Puccino's performance is quite a bit more emphatic than MdO would have ever permitted.

This half of Baudelaire's film is a reworking of a Pirandello short story, called "The Man With the Flower in His Mouth," and as a piece of literary adaptation it is pleasingly awkward, its tone poised between the emotive and the declamatory. Baudelaire is once again working with Claire Atherton, Akerman's editor, and Flower in the Mouth does have a bit of that familiar rhythm. Like When There Is No More Music, Flower in the Mouth is a film in miniature, and one gets the sense that Baudelaire is increasingly anxious these days to complete a film and get on to the next idea. In theory this should bother me, but thus far he hasn't produced anything that hasn't held my interest.