Letters to Max (2014), Also Known as Jihadi (2017), Un film dramatique (2019)

The Intersection of the Real and the Figurative
A Flower in the Mouth by Éric Baudelaire radicalizes ancient Memento Mori and offers a profound attempt to explore the reason for the film's existence. The director describes how intensely a man with an incurable disease sees and imagines the world in the movie, an adaptation of a play of the same title by Luigi Pirandello. Under the influence of death, everything is crucial; even the most minor details or sensations are vital. Multiple perspectives exist. How would the world be perceived if I no longer existed here? Pirandello makes extreme attempts, creating the view of a chair in a hospital waiting room or the perspective of a house hit by an earthquake. Describing the world is a documentary's function and why cinema was invented at the end of the 19th century. However, the role of fiction is to extend the world and to go beyond the boundary between subjectivity and personification, through which reality can be unfolded in the light of possibility, virtuality, and impossibility.

A Flower in the Mouth ramifies the relationship between reality (documentary) and metaphor (fiction), while Pirandello's flower metaphorically represents the incurable disease. Baudelaire, a huge materialist himself, deals with flowers and shows the Dutch flower market, the biggest flower market in the world, for 20 minutes. The sales of flowers, which have become a standardized commodity, transform them into the symbol of a toxic civilization that withers everything fetishized. In fact, flowers become a metaphor for industrial disease, our collective illness. So what can films do? Films can inspire people with the will to live again, to use Pirandello's expression. On July 4, 2022, a few weeks before he died by assisted suicide, Jean-Luc Godard emphasized the line from Henry IV by Pirandello, "The pleasure of a new genre: the pleasure to live in all lucidity." Nicole BRENEZ

Production Les Films du Worso (production@worso.com), Flaneur Films, M141

2022 Berlinale Caligari Film Award (Nominee)

2023 International Cinephile Society Best Adapted Screenplay (2nd place)