Human Flowers of Flesh review – meditative wanderings on the Mediterranean

The special problem of the sea is it is both smooth and striated. Smooth, because it is open and fluid, a natural form guided by coasts, buffeted by winds and held in the Earth’s rotation. Striated, because humans seek to traverse it, demarcating space, calculating distances, mapping excursions across its longitude and latitude. The sea’s dual complexity – these combined physical and political qualities – suffuses and troubles Helena Wittmann’s second feature, Human Flowers of Flesh, a work heavy on images, light on exposition, and harbouring a tendency to meditate rather than explicate. Tolerance towards this type of cinema, oblique and suggestive, will determine enjoyment: the beauty in this film is slowly accumulated, but it is there.

The story (as much as it is revealed) concerns Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) and her multinational, polylingual crew as they sail from Marseille to Corsica to Sidi-Bel-Abbes, following the precedented trail of the French Foreign Legion. Their motivation for this trip is not just historical; it is spontaneous. The six-strong group possess an occasional curiosity: bodies of water constitute a stage upon which to wander and contemplate, the promise of an endless horizon. These people embody life’s romantic attitude, quoting to one another writers of their respective tongue. Poetic passages from Marguerite Duras and Friedrich Glauser give sporadic context to the journey, offering sparse narration for the day-to-day living on deck and on shore.

To reiterate, this is a film about looking. At the beginning, Ida leads the troop of five men (an ironic comparison Wittmann insinuates) across a rocky cliff-face. They observe the boat from afar, established within a glorious seascape. When the viewer sees them, we are afforded an abridged perspective. Wittmann, as cinematographer, deploys severe styles of framing: her camera follows only the succession of feet as they negotiate the coastal terrain. Elsewhere, the filmmaker tends to abstract picture-making, showing comparably small organisms on separate trajectories: a snail on its sticky path towards some watermelon; a spider cocooning a fly in its web; nebulous bacteria gestating under a microscope. Other shots are more conventional: white buoys are match-cut elegantly to nautical portholes.

So, what is this patient, pleasant imagery in service of? The film hangs its captain’s hat on its homage to Claire Denis’ 1999 film, Beau Travail, whose influence is direct and literal. The port of Marseille, shadow boxing on the sand, pedantic bed-making: these textures provide explicit callbacks to Denis’ celebrated work and culminate in the extraordinary reintroduction of Denis Lavant’s character, Galoup, from this very source. His short scenes – standout, comic, kinetic – break the dour formal austerity, in an instant reimagining the film’s unhurried treatise on colonial power, mythic legacy and histories of extraction and conflict. These themes find a vessel in the figure of Galoup, presumed lost to a cinematic past, now juggling three eggs and acting the clown. This belated revelation expresses a kind of beauty, and it is even more striking given the meticulous, undulating visual grammar that preceded it.

Human Flowers of Flesh was screened as part of the Locarno Film Festival 2022. A UK release date is yet to be announced.