Flowers Blooming in Our Throats

Filmed in 16mm just after the lockdown caused by COVID-19, a portrait of the fragile balances that govern everyday life in a domestic setting. Gestures remain symbolically ambiguous, expressing a kind of violence that is not immediately recognizable.

There may be a virtue to the health crisis and the ordeal of lockdown: it has allowed a renewed focus on the infra-ordinary, amidst the whiteness of a daily life reduced to its simplest expression. Hence, the seemingly banal gestures that are roundly inventoried by Eva Giolo’s film: opening a window or drawer, brushing long hair, cutting a fruit, rolling a rubber band up a wrist or spinning a top with enough momentum for it to maintain its precarious balance. And then, from one body to the other, for the other, against the other: hugging, embracing, caressing, massaging, playfully hitting. Here, we take a look at the pantomime made invisible by routine. And, first of all, we listen to it so as to feel it more acutely – Flowers Blooming in Our Throats has the haptic quality of films that are attentive to the music of things. And if we need to listen closely, this is because the gestures have something to say. For, while their ritualised enactment for the camera gives the impression of dealing with a miniature Pina Bausch piece, this is because the embrace is eager to reveal its underlying grip. All you need is a red filter slipped in front of the lens as a test of truth, a blood-coloured filter borrowed from Hitchcock’s Marnie in order to thwart the seeming gentleness of the gestures’ choreography. The value of such in-depth observation and listening is that it reveals the secret world of the raging impulses crouched under the reassuring physiognomy of daily life.

Jérôme Momcilovic