Georg Csarmann
It should be noted that All Flowers in Time can be disturbing film and interested viewers should know that this isn’t an easy watch, but rewarding all the same if you want to open up your understanding of what can be done in the art of film. The product of a collaboration between Jonathan Caouette and Canada’s PHI Centre (Next Floor), the film had a powerful festival run, playing Sundance, Cannes-proper, and many other festivals (I first saw it at the Viennale two years ago) and now it has finally found its way online.
Caouette established himself as a boundary pushing filmmaker with his autobiographical first feature documentary Tarnation in 2003, which he famously produced for $218.32, editing it himself at home through iMovie. It caused quite a commotion at the time, though, with digital technology the way it is now, it wouldn’t cause the same sensation today that it did ten years ago. Pleasingly, Caouette still makes interesting and very unconventional films, as this experimental fiction short amply proves.
Starring indie darling Chloe Sevigny, who, having come of age as a muse to Harmony Korine, has a decided penchant for acting in eccentric films, All Flowers in Time creates an uncomfortable atmosphere right from the start. It’s plot includes a strange old man, a woman whose red eyes in pictures weren’t the effect of flash lights but something more mysterious, a French cowboy, and Sevigny’s character playing a game of making scary faces with a little boy. The extremes this is taken to are almost comparable to a horror movie—a very absurd one at that.
Stylistically, Caouette’s uses of garish and simplistic visual effects, pay homage to his DiY roots, but the complicated collages he constructs within the frame betray a visual sophistication. Combined with a fractured narrative, that slips between time and mediums, Caouette’s irreverence for established forms is overwhelming, and refreshing. All Flowers in Time successfully creates an unsettling mood that leaves the viewer with a lot to think—and wonder— about.