Miss Geraldine Flower remains something of a mystery from beginning to end of this extraordinary experimental biopic. Inspired by a case full of letters, photographs and — those were the days — telexes left behind by the late Miss Flower after her untimely death, the film is essentially a song cycle, performed by Icelandic singer Emilíana Torrini and filmed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the directing duo behind the 2014 Nick Cave documentary 20,000 Days on Earth. Like that film, The Extraordinary Miss Flower — which had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival this weekend — is an exercise in channeling its subject rather than simply showing and telling. And like that film, it is destined to find an eager cult audience for its psychedelic charms.
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If the name doesn’t ring a bell, that’s no surprise. Although her writing was sophisticated, and she worked periodically in the media (broadcast and print), Geraldine was mostly known to the film’s producer, her daughter Zoe Flower, who initiated the project. That Geraldine was not a celebrity is not important, it is her private life — which is, ironically, made as public as you can get here, laid out in tantalizing glimpses with sometimes explicit language — that matters.
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Key to this is the soon-to-be-lost art of letter-writing. In the film’s impressionistic, mood-setting opening scenes, the film’s unseen narrator (Sophie Ellis-Bextor) describes the humble letter as “a personal, private, permanent connection with another human being… [A souvenir] of who we were and who we thought we’d be.” This is quickly echoed by Torrini, who claims that discovering the letters kickstarted her frustratingly dormant imagination. “Letters open people up in ways that nothing else really does,” she says, conspiratorially, to camera.
The framing device, meanwhile, finds Geraldine, played by Caroline Katz, dressed in a stylish cream trouser suit sitting in a windowless, timeless bistro reflecting on her life. Katz gave a similarly metatextual role in her own experimental music biopic, Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes (2020); here, her scenes find her literally in dialogue with Torrini, and their interactions sparkle. Torrini’s lyrics can seem a little literal at first — and, like the cut-up technique used by novelist William S. Burroughs, take some getting used to — but the band’s ethereal music, together with Kate Coyne’s endearingly strange choreography, works in tandem to create an unexpectedly seductive experience.
Although the film comes in at well under 90 minutes, it takes its time to fill us in on the rudiments of Geraldine’s life (she was born in 1947, to Australian and Irish parents, before moving to London at 21) and does so in a parody of a ’70s educational TV show, hosted by Alice Lowe. The film, however, doesn’t want us to get too close, and asks us to listen to the poetry of the unknown. Of particular interest are the myriad references to spies and espionage: Are these really love letters? Could they be richly coded messages? Or does it come down to something they used to put in our tea in the late ’60s and ’70s? Answers are not forthcoming, but the enigma of Miss Flower is never less than intoxicating.
Title: The Extraordinary Miss Flower
Festival: London (Official Competition)
Distributor: Distiller
Directors: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard
Screenwriter: Stuart Evers.
Cast: Emilíana Torrini, Caroline Catz, Alice Lowe, Richard Ayoade, Nick Cave
Running time: 1 hr 13 mins