‘The Extraordinary Miss Flower’: London Review

Dirs: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard. UK. 2024. 73mins

It all started with a box – a battered case crammed with letters and telexes full of passion and poetry, all sent during the 1960s and 70s by smitten men from around the globe to a young woman named Geraldine Flower. The box was discovered after Geraldine’s death by her daughter, Zoe Flower, the producer of this inventive and creative tribute; its contents, shared with Zoe’s friend, the Icelandic musician Emiliana Torrini, inspired the singer/songwriter to write and record a series of songs.

Experimental art-adjacent end of the non-fiction film spectrum

Directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, this is a mercurial performance film that melds biographical fragments with melody; theatre and dance (former Michael Clark collaborator Kate Coyne serves as choreographer) with visual experimentation. But ultimately, the film itself is a letter, a multi-dimensional final missive sent to a woman who remains tantalisingly enigmatic throughout the picture. Existing fans of Torrini, previously of the band GusGus and the co-writer and co-producer of Kylie Minogue’s ‘Slow’, will be a target market for the film which, while niche in its appeal, could also connect with audiences attuned to the experimental art-adjacent end of the non-fiction film spectrum. 

The fact that Miss Flower remains something of a mystery should be no surprise to anyone familiar with the work of artist/filmmakers Forsyth and Pollard. Their idiosyncratic and playful portrait of Nick Cave, 20,000 Days On Earth, is a film that leaves out at least as much as it includes. But filling in the details of a life that touched many others is not the point of this film. Rather, the picture approaches her as a catalyst who unlocked something in the people she encountered: the emotions that pour onto the pages of letters, the creativity and inspiration that nourish Torrini’s musical project.

Shot at Distillery II Studio near Bristol, the film takes as its spine a collection of 10 songs, performed by Torrini and a group of musicians. The staging is an inventive combination of projections and flamboyant theatricality, with Issey Miyake-style structural costumes and imagery that leans into appropriately floral themes. And the music is lovely, with Torrini’s delicate, crystalline harmonies bringing a fragility to the words written by heartsick men over half a century ago.

The letters are also narrated, by Richard Ayaode and Nick Cave among others, the actors filmed against a cartoonish graphic black and white backdrop. And Alice Lowe provides a potted biographical history of Miss Flower which, like everything in the film, leaves us with more questions than answers.

Geraldine Flower is a character in the project, embodied in the film by actress Caroline Catz, who brings a throaty sense of dangerous possibilities to an anecdote about meeting a magician in a hotel bar. But, mostly, Miss Flower takes shape from the words in the letters, a creation conjured from the collective infatuations of the men she enthralled. Since the collection is predominantly the letters that Geraldine received rather than those that she wrote, her own authentic voice is largely absent – a problem that Torrini acknowledges, talking straight to the camera and directly addressing the muse-cipher who inspired all this adoration.

She recalls making a feverish plea to the spirit of Geraldine; the following day they found a poem that Geraldine wrote to Reggie, the man she nearly married. It forms the basis of the final and perhaps the most affecting song in the collection: the extraordinary Miss Flower weaves her magic to the last moment.