Human Flowers Of Flesh

Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) and her crew (Mauro Soares, Ingo Martens, Steffen Danek, Vladimir Vulevic, Ferhat Mouhali, Gustavo de Mattos Jahn), from different countries, cross the Mediterranean on a sailboat to explore the original headquarters of the French Foreign Legion in Sidi-Bel-Abbès in Helena Wittmann’s quietly disturbing Human Flowers Of Flesh (a highlight in the Currents programme of the 60th New York Film Festival).

Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor From Gibraltar, and, more obscurely, Swiss legionnaire and writer Friedrich Glauser’s Gourrama are washed ashore as literary flotsam, cultural remnants of boredom, dust, and heat and ultimately the longing for connection with another being in this world. And there will be Galoup, as played already a quarter of a century ago by Denis Lavant in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.

Lavant, wonderfully unpredictable and agile as ever sashays along the lonely street as Ida follows, as though she were a spy. And maybe she is, in the larger sense of detective work into the past and future. He will juggle eggs for her and sing a song of legionnaire lore.

Ida likes to wear a rattan visor, which adds to her look of dolefulness an almost childlike quality. On land, around Marseille or Corsica, there are rocky paths and cliffs and vegetation. A harbour bar is where people at night kiss and confide in strangers. Is it true that corals are born from Medusa’s blood? The houses look yellow and warm from the street lamps. A cat in the bushes looks at the goings-on.

Human Flowers Of Flesh is a film of spaces merging, physically in image, in thought, and of the senses. Shadows are literally boxing. A pool-cleaning machine becomes sea creature to the eye as it transgresses into the reflexion of the rocky wall behind the man looking on. The legionnaires have songs with lyrics proclaiming “we need space to tan our corpses.”

Onboard we see them talk and read, iron a shirt, share meals, glimpse at old postcards that speak of their destination, and occasionally someone sleeps on the worn carpet on deck. The full moon outside the porthole bounces up and down like a ball a child dropped into the night sky. Red flares communicate with the blue of the sea and Ida’s white veil.

Long dives underwater into the turquoise boundlessness are as intense as a close look at a snail who ventures out for a piece of melon on a plate shared with cactus fruit. There are pink and white breakfast radishes offered at the market and aromatic oils and monuments in the sun tell of those who died fighting.

A man chews on a fig while taking a stroll with a woman who sort of looks like Karen Blixen (from images later on back in Denmark, not straight Out Of Africa) as they gossip about the woman on her boat in Marseille and how free and fluid she may be.

We hear about a man who went back and forth, back and forth, in and out of the sea and we see while two men are playing Go, how the shadows on the right are mimicking the pieces of the game. The more we look at things, the more we see. A plane that drops parachutists like jellyfish from the sky and the world below the surface of the sea are all part of the miraculous earth we inhabit.

Here is a reminder of that and the Foreign Legion, with its legendary, often violent past and its large shadows into the present, becomes the perfect vehicle to investigate objects of nostalgia and escape fantasies, marginalisation, and the allure of what the flesh can endure.