Director: Myra Bax
Writer: Myra Bax
Cast: Vicu Bazan Szelest & Jasper Koopmans
Running time: 5 mins
There is a frame of mind that says routine is the mortal enemy of passion. The Flourishing of Love centres on a relationship which seems to prove that, both intentionally and unintentionally – as two apparently star-crossed lovers drift apart over the course of two-dozen bouquets.
After a chance encounter, a young woman Lana (Vicu Bazan Szelest) and a young man Guy (Jasper Koopmans) go through the blissful early stages of romance, only to find that familiarity extinguishes their desire.
After a first meet-cute outside a florist, where Guy literally bumps into Lana, he makes it up to her with flowers. And over the coming months, he turns up again and again, an assortment of blooms in hand; their love, apparently, flourishing like floral tribute Guy is routinely brandishing on Lana’s doorstep. Writer-director Myra Bax seems to be smartly foreshadowing what is to transpire though; because this gesture is essentially built on corpses. On stagnant, harvested plants; decapitated and ultimately doomed to wilt in a vase as a symbol of a relationship that is similarly going nowhere.
This is Bax’s first effort as a filmmaker in her own right, having previously assisted on a collaboration between Dutch internet provider KPN, and singer Meau, to promote a “safer internet”. That involvement assisting production led Bax to enrol for formal training with the London Film Academy. And all that practical experience shows here: everything looks great; each transition is sharp and well-executed; the story is well-paced and clear in its intent; the actors deliver on everything expected of them.
The problem, though, is that this is a double-edged sword (and everything I say after this is going to sound harsh; but I want to reiterate, this is a filmmaker with bags of potential). Bax has the knowhow that means on a technical basis, her film outperforms other shorts that have been well-reviewed by Indy Film Library. But that knowhow has been developed catering a distinctly corporate sense of taste – and that means that in terms of being fresh, and willing to take risks, The Flourishing of Love comes up short.
While there is early potential for something a bit more subversive, then, it does not manifest. Emblematic of this, the actors, as mentioned, deliver when it comes to what the story demands. But that isn’t really that much in the grand scheme.
Koopmans is excellent as a stereotypical man whose eyes light up whenever the door opens for him in the early days, but whose expression noticeably – and at times disturbingly – cools when a certain numerical threshold is crossed. Oh, it’s been that long, has it? Time to move on. Whether that is especially challenging of him is up for debate – but it feels likely that there are probably a thousand other stories which might cast him, and have him comfortably do exactly the same thing. More questionably, though, it feels as though Lana has even less to do.
So often in the many retellings of this story, the role of the woman is to be a glossy-eyed target; swept off her feet by the barest of minimums. A man’s attention, however utterly lacklustre, is all that is required to wholeheartedly believe in a relationship of any kind – before acting shocked that things were not as they seemed, when the inevitable betrayal or abandonment occurs.
Lana goes through all the classic steps, and Szelest commits to them with earnest energy. But she does not ever convince as her own person. Beyond the boom and bust of the whirlwind relationship, there is little to define who she is – or what she wants – and so the idea of her renewal in the film’s final chapter is largely defanged.
At the same time, in certain moments, Szelest seems to be alluding to something which may have been in earlier versions of Bax’s script, but did not make the final cut. In the penultimate opening of the door to a now-apathetic Guy, Lana looks just as bored and indifferent as he is. She seems to be on the brink of realising that beyond a mechanical, copy-paste display of affection, there is nothing keeping the pair together. That is a film which gets made all too rarely – a story which could really give new meaning to the age-old wisdom that the moral of the story ultimately recycles.
When this scenario plays out in real life, in a hetero-normative relationship, there are many, many men who simply string things along out of a sense of comfort, and routine – an idea that they have simply achieved what they have by routinely delivering flowers (or other Valentine’s Day staples). This’ll do. Meanwhile, it is left to their partner to do the hard thinking – and to finally confront the elephant in the room. That is still a difficult experience, and often there will be tears, probably from both sides.
Perhaps all this fell by the wayside because it wasn’t an easy fit into a super-short, ultimately silent movie. What remains without it is something which lacks bite, though, and while it could cut muster as an advert on that basis, independent film demands a less timid approach.
So, what we get instead of Lana acting as a determined individual with agency of her own, we get her acting as though Guy’s withdrawal is some kind of devastating shock. As though – as is usually assumed in this kind of narrative – she was just the stereotypically wide-eyed believer. Her heroism, her feat of learning and rising from the ashes, is never a proactive one which addresses the gulf in the relationship; but a reactive process of isolated recovery.
In the last moments of the story, Lana decides to do some indoor gardening. She plants a sunflower seed in a pot on the dining room table – proudly wiping dirt from her face during this apparently exhausting task, before the living, potted flower goes on to thrive. Abrasively upbeat pop plays with a punky singer blurting hollow, triumphant lyrics about never having felt worse… felt better.
“I can buy myself flowers,” as Miley Cyrus would have it. “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love anybody else?” as RuPaul would endlessly quiz us.
In that wider context, though, The Flourishing of Love feels even more underwhelming. While the sentiment remains undeniably true – that it can be helpful to develop a level of self-respect if you are going to commit to a healthy and fulfilling relationship – how many times can this particular line of advice be trotted out, before it loses its meaning? Before it becomes an insignificant and banal bon mot you might find adorning a piece of wood, hanging in a particularly tasteless Millennial living-room?
In some ways, The Flourishing of Love can’t be held accountable for that. It is not the fault of the writer-director that capital has latched onto this line of advice, and sapped it of impact by turning it into a superficial piece of merchandise – and that does not make it bad advice in itself. But what the film can be accused of, is failing to find a way of freshening up that particular sentiment for its own sake.
The Flourishing of Love does not manage to move beyond that. Even the gesture at the heart of the piece is the height of cliché, to the extent that rather than tapping into some kind of universal truth, it may cause viewers to tune out because it has so little to say about lived experience. Flowers? Really? Isn’t there something – anything –more original that people might more believably use as a signifier to build their traditions around? And if this is to be the one, then it might be advisable to treat it more cynically – to pique the interest of a jaded audience, and address the fact that for many people, flowers are not a signifier of much more than “I tried – that’s good enough, right?”
There are spades of talent on display in this film on a technical level. The Flourishing of Love looks like a million dollars, is well paced, and nicely acted. Bax knows what she has to do to be a safe pair of hands in the industry; to get what is needed from her cast and crew to convey a clear message to audiences. That should be enough to have a long and successful career in many ways. But it would be a shame not to see her push those talents further, and produce something more challenging. In the end, this story ends up a parody of its own message. It’s just going through the motions – and after the many years of RuPaul-style advice that have already flooded mainstream messaging, most audiences already love themselves well enough not to be wooed by that.