Human Flowers of Flesh (Helena Wittmann, 2022)

During a Q&A in Houston, Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro was asked why he was making so many films based on Shakespearean texts. His answer was fairly simple: "I don't like starting from nothing." So, like a collage artist, he found a way to avoid the intimidating emptiness of a blank canvas. I thought about this while watching Human Flowers of Flesh, the strange and evocative new film from Germany's Helena Wittmann. This is her second feature, following Drift, a film that had a scant narrative thread but was, by the director's own admission, a kind of fantasia on themes from the films of Michael Snow. Slow zooms, abstract pans, and a concentration of undulating ocean waves, were far more prominent than the activities of Wittmann's actors.

This interest in homage develops into a bolder, more rigorous approach in HFF. Although it takes quite awhile to notice it, Wittmann's nominal story -- a group of friends sailing the seas and stopping at various ports of call -- is a kind of clothesline on which to hang the film's deeper significance. In this case, Wittmann is focusing her attention on a very specific film, relatively recent but now fairly canonical. In her choices of locations, themes, otherwise minor details, she is jotting notes in the margins of another cinematic landmark.

[SPOILERS BEGIN HERE]

I had heard that HFF was a riff on another film before I watched it, an based on the vessel's crew, seemingly assembled from individuals from different countries and led by a charismatic woman (Angeliki Papoulia), I began to think Wittmann was playing off Ulrike Ottinger's Madame X. But no. Once we observe the slow, patient scenes of crew members ironing their clothes or painstakingly making their bunks, it's crystal clear. HFF is Wittmann's very loose meditation on Beau Travail, Claire Denis' near-universally acclaimed masterpiece of dissolute male activity and control in a remote French Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti.

This interest in Beau Travail has the paradoxical effect of making certain elements in HFF, the ways in which it is entirely different from Denis' film, all the more striking. Where Beau Travail was about the punishing desert sand, HFF is literally engulfed in the ocean blue. Where both films wield an analytical gaze at human labor, Denis overtly eroticized it, whereas Wittmann seems fascinated with the mechanics of movement itself, the formal aspects of hoisting a sail or tying off an anchor. Even the scenes of the actors walking along the shore are composed with a geometrical precision that Eisenstein would have admired.

But above all, HFF adopts a somewhat different temporal structure than Beau Travail. Denis' film was all about waiting for some confrontation that never really happened, or happened quite differently than anyone expected it to. So almost all the film's activity is preparatory, the men stuck in a sweltering limbo. Wittmann, on the other hand, creates a temporal drift, a languorous sense of bobbing along the surface of the sea, one act never really connecting to another or even implying the need for a future action. Like many moments in Apichatpong's films, HFF uses the elasticity of film time to create a suspensive non-narrativity, a kind of cinematic flotation tank.

This means that even as HFF engages with certain very clear aspects of Beau Travail -- the continual visits to Legionnaires' outposts, or the sudden switch to an underwater camera that discovers a partial fuselage from a small plane crash -- the film never seems over-directive. In clumsier hands this film could have been like one of those tours in San Francisco where you visit all the locations from Vertigo. Instead, HFF is like an intellectual supplement to Denis' film, a movement through a parallel but distinct itinerary.

In the end, Wittmann's film is indeed going somewhere. In the final fifteen minutes, Papoulia's captain character gets coffee in a cafe and, spying a particular patron, begins following him. It is indeed Denis Lavant, living alone in the commercial quarter of an African town, seemingly both eager and reluctant to have this sudden company. The end credits list him as "Sentain," the same name as the disgraced commandant from Beau Travail, so Wittmann introduces the notion (but by no means insists) that we have been tracking this man all along, finding out what became of him after being drubbed out of the Legion. (He seems to be doing fine.)

If Wittmann's project sounds like it could be a bit precious, it's worth remembering that she is following a cue from Denis' own film. In Beau Travail, Michel Subor plays an elderly Legionnaire names Bruno Forestier. The same actor played the same character 36 years earlier, in Godard's Le Petit Soldat. In its own way, Beau Travail gave us an update on Subor's benighted deserter from the Godard film. Each subsequent film, it seems, becomes less narrative-driven, more impressionistic. Should anyone choose to create their own loose interpretation of Human Flowers of Flesh, it might be nothing but hills overlooking the sea, the pure contemplation of human absence.