After making the festival circuit last year, the second feature film from Yannis Veslemes, She Loved Blossoms More, arrives over five years since he contributed to the anthology The Field Guide to Evil. This film shares some of the sensibilities with one of his fellow contributors to that anthology, Peter Strickland, in crafting a very specific and unique look to tell an ultimately straightforward story. Three brothers who go by Japan, Dummy and Hedgehog are under instruction from their father, Logo, to help build a machine that will bring back their deceased mother. This machine takes the form of a closet and intended as a form of time machine, but as their experiments continue, stranger possibilities become apparent.
As the character names suggest, the film has a fanciful and fantastical tone comparable to the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Analogue technology scattered throughout a massive house lit up with bright colours is one of many examples of Veslemes’ confident sense of visual style that is his own, avoiding the overt quirkiness of Jeunet or the sensuality of Strickland. Instead, Veslemes is determined to be as strange as possible, using discordant music throughout and casually bringing in surreal images such as a decapitated chicken walking around obliviously.
This sensibility is apparent narratively as well as visually by the lack of explanation as to how this family were able to make this machine, understanding that and how the machine is made is less interesting than why it was made and what it is used for. The opening montage of Logo’s early experiments tell us that there has been at least ‘two years of failures’ with Logo justifying his persistence when questioned by Hedgehog that ‘You can bring back the dead. As long as the living want to.’ The film never lets us forget the inherent sadness motivating these experiments as well as the horror of when the experiments go wrong. Impressive (seemingly) practical effects are well done, particularly with the split head that is used for the poster, simultaneously upsetting and beautiful to look at, viscerally showing the consequences of this possibly futile quest.
Listing all these things in the film shows its strengths, but as a whole, the film feels like it doesn’t come together coherently. It’s all a bit too heady, presenting lots of stuff to admire but difficult to engage with emotionally or narratively. Having characters take drugs and/or get drunk throughout a film requires skilled filmmaking to keep things interesting, and while Veslemes has clear talent, he struggles to build sufficient momentum outside of individual set pieces. The relationship between the brothers is clearly key to the narrative thrust but it is neglected in favour of more visual flourishes. Watching them react to the strangeness alongside us is satisfying to an extent but ultimately hard to care about when it’s hard to gauge how the characters are affected by it all.
Seeing something so original is always worth praising but I can’t pretend that is always enough to keep me engaged. Striking visuals and unusual images can be easily undermined by an underdeveloped story treading on familiar themes. The poster image of the split head is striking but would be more impactful if the character it happens to wasn’t just introduced as a catalyst and actually had any interiority to make us care about her. Hedgehog consistently refers to the closet as ‘more than a time machine’, but like the film in general, this promises more than it delivers. It may be a portal to strangeness, but once you’ve gone through it, there isn’t really much to draw you in further.
SHE LOVED BLOSSOMS MORE IS IN AMERICAN THEATERS AND ON VOD/DIGITAL PLATFORMS OCTOBER 3rd via Dark Sky Films
