She is young and pretty, a little mousy, with an artsy shock of hair. He is middle-aged, with severe, hawkish features, and is almost always formally dressed. She gigs as a model and shacks up with a volatile, once-notable artist who treats her callously. He is single, jobless but with a great deal of money, and spends his time collecting art and practicing the organ at the local church. His name is Charles, and her name is Lisa, and they seem to have met at a community art class where Charles is a student, painting, among other things, Lisa’s naked body.
But outside of class, for $100, Charles has Lisa come to his ornate home so that he may watch her—methodically, smilingly—fully disrobe. He can only last so long before he is overwhelmed, and he must escape to another room.
It’s a striptease, of course, though for Charles Bremer, the label is too crude. And since Charles is the protagonist, his is the point-of-view Dutch-Australian director Paul Cox has viewers co-engage with for the majority of the narrative; her disrobing is shown to the tune of an opera, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammemoor, as Lisa strips to her skivvies and beyond, and the camera cuts to a seated Charles, who looks increasingly perturbed by her gradual revelation.
And before anyone is introduced, there is that Titian, Venus with an Organ Player, Cox begins his film with, tracing the painted man’s stare to the reclining, painted nude, all while the operatics resound and continue into the story proper.
Yes, a striptease would be too crude. A crude man, after all, sees in a beautiful naked woman his own base desire looking back at him. Charles sees flowers.
Sure: Art and sex. We’ve been here before. It is to Cox’s credit that this odd little production (clocking in at a mere ninety-one minutes) entrances so, despite familiar thematic territory. Another film, given the same territory and a lesser filmmaker, would lose itself in the sort of grand pronouncements that such a theme evokes.
But Man of Flowers is an interesting character study because Cox relates Charles’s world through small, piquant touches that show just enough for the viewer to themselves intuit the nature and origin of his particular neurosis; that being, as previously alluded to, a kind of exaggerated anthophilia, which Charles compulsively conflates with both his passion for high art and his erotic want(s). Lisa, still in the flower of her own womanhood, is the embodiment of this conflation.
There is also enough humor to stave off any further self-seriousness, since, again, given the themes at play, some amount of that is pre-fitted. Take, for instance, the scene where the art class instructor comes across Charles’s painting of their nude model, where he has draped over her frame the sinuous curves of some flowers where no flowers are actually present. She has just cautioned her students, in a clipped Continental accent, to “only draw what you see” – a fine enough starting point, but clearly unmindful of more atypical visions.
Or the scene when Charles calls in to a Christian radio program in order to confess his paraphilia, and perhaps receive some counsel from a kindly religious perspective, especially one who claims that God approves of human sexuality:
CHARLES: Would God approve of someone who saw flowers as…sensually arousing, tender, loving beings?
HOST: Uh…what do you actually do to flowers?
CHARLES: I paint them. I draw them. I smell them. Sometimes, I hold them.
HOST: Are you putting me on?
CHARLES: No.
HOST: I mean, I get a lot of calls like this, especially in this fucking country which seems to have a sense of humor that I do not share.
CHARLES: No, no, I mean what I said.
HOST: You’re saying that you see flowers as “arousing sensual beings” and you “smell” them?
CHARLES: Yes, that’s what I said.
HOST: Brother, you’re in need of a special prayer. Your name is on the list, along with the other unfortunates, and will be included in the special prayer of intercession and forgiveness at the end of this broadcast.
Why is Charles like this? Flashbacks in the form of grainy home video are interspersed throughout, featuring him as a boy, wilting under the exacting eye of his father, played by a scowling Werner Herzog. Early encounters with the naked female figure—most pointedly that of his own mother—and other relatives/intimates seem to have inculcated a guilt-ridden erotic fascination, exacerbated by paternal punishment. He writes letters to his mother detailing his exploits, though the viewer can tell early on that there is a delusory quality to these missives.
Beauty, distanced by aestheticization, and made unattainable by its very enframing. The film does a good job of showing how art is not just an object of aesthetic appreciation; it can also act as a barrier, a screen through which one filters emotional experience or else transfers it altogether, as Charles does his bothersome lusts to the beautiful items he surrounds himself with.
Is Man of Flowers perfect? Far from it – a late turn robs the film of its prior realism, however darkly ironic, and though the narrative has been building up to a confrontation, to escalate matters in such a way feels unearned, especially since Charles is portrayed as an oddball, even a little creepy, but not someone liable to commit acts of outright moral depravity. Yes, one might argue that his eventual deed is prefigured in the art lesson scene, where he is willing to get violent over art, but boxing someone in the nose is one thing; murder another.
Plus, how the logistical matters of Charles’s act are breezed through signals to the viewer that Cox is prioritizing the off-kilter, irreal aspects of his story rather than a more serious exploration of such consequences. This is not exactly a fatal decision, per se, since the film remains engaging despite its tilt into the macabre, but there is a level of depth it cannot plumb as a result of it.
Alyson Best is good as the perky, all-too impressionable Lisa, as is Chris Haywood’s David, Lisa’s scummy artist boyfriend. (The scene between him and Charles debating artistic philosophy in his studio is one of the film’s funniest, and best.) But it is Norman Kaye as the titular character who stands out, and fittingly so. He captures Charles’s neuroticism perfectly, as there is clear poise despite how detached he feels from the rest of society. You can always tell a great actor by their ability to communicate with their eyes—and Kaye has that in spades. His background as a classically trained organist himself is also amply displayed in the film; and one also sees how any kind of dissonance in Charles’s life transfers to his artistry, groaning through the music he finds solace in.
Man of Flowers, though a small film, is a good one; what it has to say about the nexus between beauty, art and erotic desire is not particularly new, but Cox communicates his ideas quite ably, even so. While well-regarded in his day, the writer-director has faded to relative obscurity after his death in 2016, and copies of his films are very difficult to locate. A shame, though not uncommon, as it is the fate of many talented artists to be forgotten. But all the better, then, for those who come across the works of such artists and get to experience the thrill of a great discovery. I say find any way you can to get a hold of Man of Flowers, for its little rewards are well worth their slow and careful unraveling.
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