A Flower in the Mouth

Artist Éric Baudelaire’s film is a cinematic diptych, a reflection on the passing of time and on how to live the days that are given to us. The first act, set in the largest flower market in the world in Aalsmeer, Holland, is shot in documentary style: the industrial handling, preparation and storage of millions of bouquets passing through large refrigerated hangars to be auctioned, fueling a globalized and environmentally problematic market. In the second act, freely inspired by the play The Man with a Flower in his Mouth, written by Luigi Pirandello in 1922, an actor plays a man suffering from an epithelioma – a mouth tumor incurable at the time of Pirandello – who approaches a traveler in a bar, at night, in a Parisian train station. Their seemingly trivial conversation becomes a metaphysical monologue when the man, who feels death approaching, clings to life by scrupulously observing the facts, as if to bridge the gap between himself and the rest of the world. The man is played by the actor Oxmo Puccino, the client by Dalì Benssalah.