Flowers from Another World
Flores de otro mundo
Icíar Bollaín (1999)
The ‘Once Upon a Time in Spain’ strand at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) included films by Icíar Bollaín, whose best-known work is Take My Eyes (2003). Her surprise appearance at the screening of Flowers from Another World was a real bonus. In a Q&A with the exceedingly enthusiastic Niall Greig Fulton (an EIFF programmer as well as a familiar acting face), Bollaín summarised the dual real-life inspiration for her film. First, an article she read about a community in rural Spain whose marriageable females were so few that the locals organised a ‘bachelor festival’ – a group of urban women were bussed in for a kind of speed-dating holiday. Second, a photo Bollaín saw in a magazine of a South American immigrant woman, standing alone, and as if lost, in the Spanish countryside: how did she get there? Bollaín also mentioned that the depopulation of rural Spain, especially through migration of women to cities, has continued apace since she made Flowers from Another World. We often hear that the issues treated in a film of yesteryear are-just-as-relevant-today. In this case, it seems to be true; but Bollaín uses an important socio-economic phenomenon as the basis for exploring particular (though illustrative) human relationships, rather than in order to make obvious political points.
She sets her story in Santa Eulalia, a small town in the northern Spanish province of Guadalajara, and focuses on three pairings there. Marirossi (Elena Irureta) is a nurse in Bilbao, in her forties, divorced with an adult son. She embarks on a relationship with Alfonso (Chete Lera), a mildly eccentric country mouse who runs a plant nursery. They start seeing each other at weekends but both are reluctant to abandon the place and lifestyle they’re accustomed to. Patricia (Lissete Mejía), an illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic who’s struggling to find steady employment in Madrid, needs stability and immigration papers for herself and her two young children. Damián (Luis Tosar), a hardworking young farmer who lives with his widowed mother Gregoria (Amparo Valle), is just what Patricia is looking for. She and Marirossi are among the coach party of women that arrives in Santa Eulalia at the start of the film. The third featured relationship is rather different. Local builder Carmelo (José Sancho) regularly spends time in Cuba. He brings Milady (Marilyn Torres) from there as a kind of trophy fiancée. Milady is keen to experience life in Europe, less keen on sharing it with the distinctly senior Carmelo, in spite of the all-mod-cons house on offer.
The film gets off to an excellent start. As the women’s coach heads to its destination, the conversation and arrangement of the passengers neatly introduce social differences within the group and ethnic hierarchy, with the Dominican women in the back seats. It’s high summer and the people of Santa Eulalia are out in force: their exuberant, jubilant reaction to the coach’s arrival is amusingly mystifying unless you know in advance (I didn’t) why the women have come. The following sequence – a welcoming reception, followed by music and dancing – makes things clearer. It also includes the first exchanges between Marirossi and Alfonso, and Patricia and Damián. After a short scene in the Dominican women’s bedroom, which tells us there’s already another man in Patricia’s life, Bollaín moves on at rather startling speed. In the next scene, Patricia and her two children are living at the farmhouse with Damián and his grimly possessive, distinctly inhospitable mother.
Agile, economical storytelling is one of the sustained strengths of Flowers from Another World. The screenplay – by Bollaín and Julio Llamazares, a poet, novelist and essayist whose persisting concerns include the gradual decline of Spain’s rural cultural heritage – is simply and efficiently structured. The action covers a year, moving through the various seasons and ending with the arrival of the next summer’s coachload of women. Thanks largely to fine, naturalistic ensemble acting, the film is never less than engaging. Even so, the episodic narrative is a little underpowered until each of the three central relationships is in crisis. And because so much here is thoroughly believable, the engineered parts of the plot stick out more. They accumulate in the tale of Patricia and Damián.
When her Dominican friends arrive from Madrid for the weekend, their visit brings to a head the increasing tensions between Patricia and her de facto mother-in-law. It’s hard to believe that Gregoria, well aware of the impending visit, wouldn’t have raised objections beforehand. After the friends have left, there’s a showdown; from this point on, the older woman starts gradually to warm to the younger. There’s no stopping this process once it’s begun – even when Patricia is forced eventually to confess to Damián that she’s already married (to a fellow Dominican, the father of her children, who turns up again and demands hush money). This revelation would have provoked the Gregoria of the film’s first half to vindictive schadenfreude. But the plot requires that she comes to accept Patricia and her children – so much so that when the understandably aggrieved Damián tells them to leave, it’s his mother who persuades him to change his mind in the nick of time. The moment when he stops her friend’s car just as Patricia is about to leave, is affecting because the characters have come to matter to us. But it belongs in a more familiar and formulaic type of screen love story.
In other respects, though, the relationship is convincing. Damián is smitten with Patricia from the start. When she confesses that she’s married, she admits too that she’s been living with him for reasons of practical necessity rather than love, which of course offends Damián all the more. His rejection of her is upsetting both because his sense of being betrayed is justified and because we believe that, as Patricia insists, she has gradually fallen in love with him. Bollaín’s judicious treatment of the material’s racial aspect pays off too. The friendship between Patricia and Milady – women of colour in a white community, one more experienced in Europe than the other – is credible; so too the casual racism directed at Milady in a local bar. We can speculate that Gregoria’s hostility towards Patricia also has a racist element but Bollaín does well not to make this explicit. If she’d done so, the mother’s transformation would have been even more implausible. Patricia and Damián are the only one of the three couples still together at the end of the story. Patricia’s daughter is seen taking her first communion – with her younger brother, mother, Damián and his mother in the congregation. They all pose together for a family photograph.
Rangy Marilyn Torres has an amazing figure and Milady would cut a spectacular one in metropolitan Spain, let alone a rural backwater: her trademark outfit is a stars-and-stripes Lycra number (one long leg of the pants is all stars, the other all stripes). College-educated and relatively liberated, Milady spends plenty of time on the phone, talking tearfully to her mother in Cuba and hopefully to a boyfriend in Italy, which is where she wants to get to. Anywhere outside the small town will do in the meantime. She hitches a lift to Valencia with a lorry driver (Antonio de la Torre) and stays there overnight. When she returns to Santa Eulalia, Carmelo beats her up. She eventually escapes the place thanks to an adoring young admirer (Rubén Ochandiano) but she has no intention of staying with him either, though she flees their hotel room rather guiltily. That’s the last see of Milady: she disappears to somewhere in Europe, which makes sense. The Marirossi-Alfonso thread is relatively slender and undramatic but it complements the other two effectively. They eventually break off contact much more in sorrow than in anger. The break is inevitable and Bollaín doesn’t try to make it anything else. As a result, it’s dramatically satisfying too.
The cast are a mix of professional and non-professional actors – and Bollaín, in what was only her second feature, orchestrates them admirably. Despite the patchy writing of the Patricia-Damián element, the performances in it are outstanding. It’s incredible that Lissete Mejía had never acted before; the child who plays her daughter is equally expressive[1]. Bollaín had a good story about the casting of this little girl. The main child’s part was to be a boy’s but the kid playing him decided after the first day of shooting that was enough so the girl was promoted – a great piece of luck. In what was his first significant cinema role, you can’t take your eyes off Luis Tosar: the combination of the actor’s powerful presence and his character’s modesty and shyness, which Tosar plays beautifully, makes you understand Patricia’s deepening fascination with and attachment to Damián. This film marked the start of Tosar’s rapid progress to becoming one of Spain’s leading actors (he worked again with Bollaín on both Take My Eyes and Even the Rain (2010)). He’s been joined in that category by Antonio de la Torre who, as the lorry driver that gives Milady a lift, has only a couple of minutes on screen here but still registers strongly. Pascal Gaigne’s excellent score captures the considerable range of moods and Icíar Bollaín’s enriching sympathy for the people whose lives she describes.
22 June 2019
[1] She’s probably not uncredited but I’ve tried and failed to work out from the IMDb cast list her character’s name. The same goes for Patricia’s friends and husband.