• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Oct 29, 2015 By Jason Wilson Web Exclusive

Ane (Nagore Aranburu) is diagnosed with menopause in the opening scenes of Flowers, Spain’s submission for the 2016 Academy Awards. She is younger than most to receive this news. In the following weeks, a different bouquet of flowers begins arriving every Thursday by courier. Meanwhile, Benat and Lourdes are not happy. The source of their sadness is to be inferred, and Benat’s mother isn’t helping. He operates a crane at the construction site where Ane also works. When he dies in a car accident, the flowers stop arriving at Ane’s doorstep.

This all happens in the first third of the film. It’s a setup to what follows, which is mostly an examination on dealing with unexpected trauma and grief. Everyone in this film has to deal with serious problems earlier in their lives than they would have ever had to expect. Ane’s body is changing, Lourdes loses her husband – her second – and Benat’s mother loses her only son.

Using a car accident to tie story threads together is a common device, and can feel overwritten. At first, it doesn’t really gel. The strings show too much. Happenstance and accidents happen, but every circumstance leading up to the accident leaves things unsaid in a very tight little package that it is ever so slightly off. It’s temporary. Flowers is a sweet, melancholic movie. It toes the line between quaint human drama and the ‘everything-is-connected’ subgenre popularized and bludgeoned by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. The writing and directing team carefully constructs a quiet meditation about loss and regret. While it doesn’t exactly break any new ground, it allows the scenes time to breathe and doesn’t explain things within an inch of their lives.

Literal flowers are at the center of everything, too. While Benat’s motivations for sending Ane the flowers in the first place are mysterious, it results in her visiting his accident site and returning the favor. Flowers represent both life and death in equal measure. The one subplot that could be lifted from the film is Benat’s body being donated to a university. While this isn’t entirely out of place, the scenes that periodically remind the audience that’s where he ended up are superfluous and deviate too much from the main narrative arcs.

Javier Agirre’s cinematography is beautifully composed. Shot after shot would be at home in a photography magazine. It punctuates the still nature of grieving and feeling helpless to do anything to change things. In a movie without zombies or sorcery, the dead stay dead and the living need to pull the pieces together.

www.loreakfilm.com/es/

Author rating: 8/10