‘The Extraordinary Miss Flower’: London Review

Dirs: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard. UK. 2024. 73mins

It began with a field – a battered case full of letters and telexes filled with ardour and poetry, all despatched throughout the Nineteen Sixties and 70s by smitten males from across the globe to a younger lady named Geraldine Flower. The field was found after Geraldine’s loss of life by her daughter, Zoe Flower, the producer of this creative and inventive tribute; its contents, shared with Zoe’s buddy, the Icelandic musician Emiliana Torrini, impressed the singer/songwriter to jot down and document a sequence of songs.

Experimental art-adjacent finish of the non-fiction movie spectrum

Directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, it is a mercurial efficiency movie that melds biographical fragments with melody; theatre and dance (former Michael Clark collaborator Kate Coyne serves as choreographer) with visible experimentation. However finally, the movie itself is a letter, a multi-dimensional closing missive despatched to a girl who stays tantalisingly enigmatic all through the image. Present followers of Torrini, beforehand of the band GusGus and the co-writer and co-producer of Kylie Minogue’s ‘Sluggish’, will probably be a goal marketplace for the movie which, whereas area of interest in its enchantment, may additionally join with audiences attuned to the experimental art-adjacent finish of the non-fiction movie spectrum. 

The truth that Miss Flower stays one thing of a thriller ought to be no shock to anybody conversant in the work of artist/filmmakers Forsyth and Pollard. Their idiosyncratic and playful portrait of Nick Cave, 20,000 Days On Earth, is a movie that leaves out a minimum of as a lot because it consists of. However filling within the particulars of a life that touched many others just isn’t the purpose of this movie. Fairly, the image approaches her as a catalyst who unlocked one thing within the folks she encountered: the feelings that pour onto the pages of letters, the creativity and inspiration that nourish Torrini’s musical mission.

Shot at Distillery II Studio close to Bristol, the movie takes as its backbone a set of 10 songs, carried out by Torrini and a bunch of musicians. The staging is an creative mixture of projections and flamboyant theatricality, with Issey Miyake-style structural costumes and imagery that leans into appropriately floral themes. And the music is beautiful, with Torrini’s delicate, crystalline harmonies bringing a fragility to the phrases written by heartsick males over half a century in the past.

The letters are additionally narrated, by Richard Ayaode and Nick Cave amongst others, the actors filmed towards a cartoonish graphic black and white backdrop. And Alice Lowe supplies a potted biographical historical past of Miss Flower which, like every thing within the movie, leaves us with extra questions than solutions.

Geraldine Flower is a personality within the mission, embodied within the movie by actress Caroline Catz, who brings a throaty sense of harmful prospects to an anecdote about assembly a magician in a resort bar. However, principally, Miss Flower takes form from the phrases within the letters, a creation conjured from the collective infatuations of the lads she enthralled. For the reason that assortment is predominantly the letters that Geraldine obtained reasonably than people who she wrote, her personal genuine voice is basically absent – an issue that Torrini acknowledges, speaking straight to the digicam and straight addressing the muse-cipher who impressed all this adoration.

She remembers making a feverish plea to the spirit of Geraldine; the next day they discovered a poem that Geraldine wrote to Reggie, the person she almost married. It types the idea of the ultimate and maybe probably the most affecting tune within the assortment: the extraordinary Miss Flower weaves her magic to the final second.