Human Flowers of Flesh (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Vedant Srinivas

Produced by Frank Scheuffele, Karsten Krause and Julia Cöllen; directed by Helena Wittmann; screenplay by Helena Wittmann; cinematography by Helena Wittmann; production and costume design by Anna Ostby; music and sound design by Nika Son; starring Angeliki Papoulia, Ferhat Mouhali, Gustavo de Mattos Jahn, Ingo Martens, Mauro Soares, Vladimir Vulevic, Steffen Danek, Nina Villanova, Denis Lavant. Color, 106 min., with English dialogue, and French, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, German, and Tamazight dialogue with English subtitles, 2022. A Cinema Guild release. 

In recent times, a certain kind of filmmaking practice has increasingly come to dominate the international art-house and film festival circuit. This strand of contemporary art cinema, referred to as Slow Cinema, draws proponents from various national and regional traditions, including, though certainly not limited to, filmmakers as diverse as Bela Tarr (Hungary), Wang Bing (China), Carlos Reygadas (Mexico), Albert Serra (Spain), Jessica Hausner (France), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), and Kelly Reichardt (USA). As a mix of realist and modernist film practices, Slow Cinema’s aesthetic trademarks have come to include the employment of long takes, negligible use of dialogue, little or no narrative, and a pronounced emphasis on stillness and duration. 

On the face of it, Helena Wittmann’s new film, Human Flowers of Flesh, adheres quite firmly to the—perhaps increasingly formulaic—dictates of Slow Cinema. And yet, there is something singularly mysterious about Human Flowers, assembled as it is according to a continuously shifting logic of space and time. What distinguishes Wittmann from her Slow Cinema counterparts is her unique modus operandi: Wittmann’s films are wholly organized around the phenomenon of water. 

Halfway into Wittmann’s first feature, Drift (2017), the narrative—ostensibly about two friends who spend some time together and part ways—is suddenly taken over by the colors, rhythms, and textures of the ocean. A jaw-dropping thirty-minute sequence ensues, in which we are made privy to various manifestations of seawater: the sea arching and cascading in great billowing swells, glistening in the sunlight, coalescing and decoalescing like jelly; a voluminous sea of various hues and colors, from milky white, gray, indigo, and Prussian blue to the oleaginous ink-black sea of the night. When the film finally finds its way back to the story, nothing remains the same, least of all the subjectivity of the characters. Human Flowers of Flesh, too, uses water as an organizing principle, but simultaneously expands beyond the subjective perception of Drift to include the wider world beyond. 

A basic plot summary of Human Flowers would go as follows: while on shore leave in Marseille, Ida (Angeliki Papoulia), the captain of a ship, becomes intrigued by the secretive world of the French Foreign Legion, and instinctively decides to sail to the legion’s former headquarters in Algeria with her all-male crew. In true art-house fashion, Human Flowers evokes a mood of ambiguity right from the start—no background information is provided about Ida, nor about the crew members, all of whom come from different countries, or their relationships. Wittmann withholds all conventional storytelling techniques, such that even the journey from the legion headquarters in Marseille to Corsica and on to Sidi Bel Abbés (now Algeria) is not specified. Meanwhile, the crew spend their time doing everyday chores and reading poetic entries from books and journals, while also occasionally indulging in tender acts of care. As viewers, we are thrust into the thick of the narrative, which gradually turns out to be not so much about the destination as about the seafaring journey. 

Indeed, Human Flowers provides a ravishing sensorial experience of what it means to be a human being on the sea. It is hard to overstate the immersive experience of the film, the extent to which it can evoke the buoyant sense of being on a ship. In shot after shot, we see the ship drop and rise with the waves, an undulating movement that soon becomes part of one’s proprioceptive awareness. Sunlight, and occasionally moonlight, dances along the wooden interiors of the ship, its motion in tune with the bobbing horizon occasionally glimpsed through the cabin window. Accompanying these images are the sounds of water, the nautical murmurs of the sea. The susurrating of waves is audible nearly without interruption, accompanied at regular intervals by the sounds of the ship itself—the creaking and heaving of ropes, the thudding sound of wood meeting water, and of the sail flapping against the wind. 

Wittmann completely dispenses with cause-and-effect narrative logic, instead relying on an oneiric juxtaposition of discrete episodes: a crew member ironing clothes; another one rolling a cigarette or playing checkers; a shot of a snail traipsing over a plate of cut fruits, only to be picked up and taken off screen by a human hand; followed by tranquil shots of the bobbing horizon. Indeed, what powers the narrative forward is not so much a predefined plot as the elemental course of nature, the play of light and foam, and of wind, water, dew, and fog. Such disconnected sequences lend a soporific effect to the film’s unfolding, until one finds oneself quite literally lost at sea. It is no longer the characters (or spectators) looking out into the world but the world looking into and percolating through them—moving, rocking, and swaying them, engendering an attention both free-floating and vast. 

Wittmann is interested in seawater’s cultural connotations—of travel, sustenance, connection, division, and disaster—but also in its material qualities, its permeability, solubility, state of constant flux, and most importantly its haptic dimension, the wetness of water as something to be touched and felt. Perhaps the crux of Human Flowers is to be found in the encounter between sea and land, and correspondingly between liquidity and hardness. Wittmann frames Ida’s conversation with a friend, amidst her increasing fascination with the legion, in a long shot, with the two human figures seated in a place where land meets sea. Contrasting the solidity and rigidity of land, exemplified in part by the hypermasculinity of the French Legion, is the incessant movement, shift, and flow of water, carrying associations of openness and fluidity. Much later, in one of the film’s many haunting sequences, we will see Ida attempting to swim against the sea current, then slowly giving in and floating weightless on its surface, caressed by lapping waves—her solid identity dissolving into the viscosity of the water. 

Without ever resorting to in-your-face spirituality, Human Flowers dissolves the boundaries between the perceiver and perceived, and between human, animal, and vegetal realms, as when banal sequences of the crew members going about their routines are suddenly punctuated by Painlevé-esque cyanotype images of floral and microscopic sea life. In another sequence, the camera suddenly dives into the water, and, after an astonishing interlude of aqueously blue-tinted 8mm footage, finds in the depths a disintegrating human vessel, now home to layers of seaweed and lichen. Wittmann later superimposes the blue-tinted microscopic imagery onto familiar sequences of the crew members eating, smoking, and playing checkers. Here, the microscopic and the macroscopic blend together, giving rise to a vision of a world bursting with vitality. 

Wittmann’s decision to shoot on 16mm film further complements this idea of interconnectedness. Much like the photochemical process, which requires the physical imprint of reality on film, matter in Human Flowers too carries inscriptions of various forms—biological, historical, geographical, cultural, and mythic. Concrete matter, be it water, rocks, buildings, or even cities, carries within it traces of its meaning and history. This, in one sense, could be what Wittmann is attempting to get at: the dazzlingly myriad layers that make up the infinite abundance of reality, of which humans, too, are an integral part. 

Such traces moreover are not restricted to the material world. Much like Drift, which ends with a tribute to Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), Human Flowers is likewise strewn with references to filmmakers and cinema history. For instance, any mention of the Foreign Legion is invariably bound to conjure up sunbaked images of Beau travail (1999), Claire Denis’s striking meditation on masculinity and colonialism. Wittmann, rather than shying away from the creative antecedent, wears its influence on her sleeve, even featuring in the end—much to the delight of cinephiles—an electrifying cameo by Denis Lavant as Sergeant Galoup. Another prominent source of reference is Marguerite Duras’s novel The Sailor from Gibraltar, in which a lovelorn woman sails the Mediterranean Sea in search of her long-lost paramour. Wittmann loosely borrows thematic elements from these works, but her main inspiration is stylistic. What she is most interested in is the meandering narratives of Denis’s and Duras’s works, (non)narratives which eschew linear storylines and instead revel in their textural and sensorial qualities. 

Another important influence, and one that curiously has not been remarked upon by critics so far, is that of the Berlin School auteur Angela Schanelec, under whom Wittmann studied at the art academy in Hamburg. Both indeed share a proclivity for narrative elision, opaqueness, and ellipsis. It is also perhaps no coincidence that the inciting incident of Human Flowers—Ida finding out about the French Legion—takes place in Marseille, the eponymous title of a formally adventurous Schanelec film set in the same port city. 

Wittmann’s works, in fact, could be said to belong to a long lineage of women filmmakers, including Agnés Varda, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, and Schanelec, whose major works have revolved around the mysterious proclivities of wandering female characters. One can easily glimpse in Human Flowers of Flesh echoes of Varda’s Vagabond (1985); Akerman’s The Meetings of Anna (1978), along with her early short films; Duras’s India Song (1975); and Schanelec’s Marseille (2004), especially in the manner in which each of these films revolves around a peripatetic female character, whose very existence becomes an act of defiance both to traditional narrative structure and the world at large.

Wittmann further shares with her predecessors a penchant for withholding exposition, especially when pertaining to the desires and motivations of female characters. Early on in Human Flowers, one of the male crew members describes Ida as a woman who lives on her boat, and about whom not much is known. He goes on to say, “I imagine her life very free. Always in movement, fluid.” Barring this instance, no other information is offered about Ida, whose vivid interiority, much like characters populating the films mentioned above, remains essentially unknowable and out of reach. 

Despite its impressive use of film language, Human Flowers does suffer from occasional drawbacks. The Foreign Legion plot point, arguably the pivot of the film, doesn’t quite sit well with the film’s minimalist Slow Cinema aesthetic. In interviews, Wittmann has remarked about her extensive research on the colonial history of the legion, and how she began to see the legionnaires everywhere after the unit was enlarged in 2015 (following the Paris terror attacks). And yet, the film’s treatment of the legion, an organization deeply rooted in the region and with its own ambivalent history, is decidedly blasé. One wonders how different the film would have been if Ida’s fancy had been caught not by the legion but by something else, even and especially something far removed from it. Subsumed under Wittmann’s enduring fascination with the sea, the Foreign Legion strand appears more as a reckoning with cinephilic history than with its sociopolitical repercussions. 

Equally underwhelming is Wittmann’s occasional use of exposition, which, in a film with barely a few snippets of dialogue, often comes across as too direct and overwrought. For instance, early in the film, one of the crew members leisurely recounts the myth of Medusa, no doubt a subtextual invitation to engage with the mythic grandeur of the sea. Later scenes are similarly punctuated with crew members reading aloud journal entries about the pleasures of being adrift or lost at sea (in Drift, a character recounts a Papua New Guinea creation myth about a giant crocodile paddling in the primeval ocean). Wittmann intends to lend a certain metaphorical weight to the proceedings, to open them out, so to speak, to liminal dimensions of experience. Such forced metaphorization, however, weakens the power of the film, since it is precisely the opposite—the brute force and immediacy with which the world impinges itself upon us—that makes Human Flowers such a remarkable viewing experience. After all, it is water-as-matter that gives rise to water-as-metaphor, and no amount of linguistic philosophizing can do justice to the visual sublimity of the former. 

Notwithstanding its flaws, Human Flowers of Flesh seethes with a primal intensity. In its mesmerizing interplay of image and sound, and in the sensuous mingling of human bodies and landscapes, it is an unforgettable experience to behold. It is a film one can endlessly wade around in and plunge into—rocked to and fro, slowly lulled into dreams by lapping waves. A wondrous piece of liquid cinema.

Vedant Srinivas is a freelance writer from New Delhi, India, with an academic background in philosophy and filmmaking. His writing has appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, MUBI Notebook, Photogenie, Offscreen, and Visual Anthropology Review.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 1