A much deeper meaning: a review of Eva Giolo’s ‘Flowers Blooming In Our Throats’ — Film Friday

I took the message of the film to be that, naturally, domestic abuse needs to be rid of its anonymity.

Photo credit: IFFR

After receiving a press pass from the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) for the February 2021 edition of their annual week-long event, I have written reviews for Bournbrook magazine of entries to the festival’s Ammodo Tiger Short competition, many of which are experimental in design, and play with a range of cinematic forms and ideas.

Out of context, Eva Giolo’s film, Flowers Blooming In Our Throats, appeared to me initially as an experimental documentary short fashioned in a surrealist way à la Dalí and Buñuel.

The repeated close-ups of people’s hands making different gestures, some of which had violent connotations, reminded me of several unsettling scenes from the Dalí/Buñuel collaboration, Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) or even Dalí’s subsequent experimental film, L’Âge d’Or. There’s no doubt that this film pays its debts to its cinematic forebears.

Credit: IFFR

The sometimes fast-cutting and use of red-coloured filters reminded me instantly of the Nouvelle Vague or French New Wave experimentation of Jean-Luc Godard in films such as Pierrot le fou. Moreover, the red-filtered shot of water going down a plughole and a close-up of a hand clutching at something seemed to me instantly Hitchcockian, reminding us of the last seconds of Marion Crane in that infamous shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Not to mention the fact that the film was shot on authentic 16mm film stock which gave it that vintage feel. 

That said, this film is not merely in part a homage to cinema’s past, it is, more profoundly, a film made to raise awareness of domestic violence, a fact which I became aware of while watching the end credits. This is a topic which is so embedded in modern consciousness. The close-up shots I had seen of hands pulling and gripping each other as well as hands slapping other hands in the guise of ‘play’ were given a much deeper meaning.

Giolo has cleverly filmed Flowers Blooming In Our Throats in such a way that we never see characters’ faces, only either the backs of heads, or, as I’ve been saying, hands. This fact, to me, highlights that even in this more enlightened age, domestic abuse is still often invisible as it takes place in a private setting.

I took the message of the film to be that, naturally, domestic abuse needs to be rid of its anonymity, particularly in this home-bound state that the current pandemic has placed us in, and that victims need to be both seen and heard, and the perpetrators, exposed.