Parky At the Pictures (9/5/2025)

(Reviews of The Extraordinary Miss Flower)

THE EXTRAORDINARY MISS FLOWER.

Having co-directed the stylised Nick Cave biodoc, 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have reunited for The Extraordinary Miss Flower. Inspired by the letters and telexes left following by writer Geraldine Flower her untimely death, this is an ambitious blend of commemorative celebration and performance piece that has been produced by Zoe Flower, who shared the documents left behind by her mother to her friend, the Icelandic musician Emilíana Torrini, who was sufficiently inspired to write an award-winning album that now forms the core of this uniquely innovative feature.

A narrator (Sophie Ellis-Bextor) mourns the decline of the art of letter writing, as it establishes `a personal, private, permanent connection with another human being', while also allowing us to retain a memento of `who we were and who we thought we'd be'. She also reveals that Geraldine Flower was an Australian who found herself in London in the 1960s. When she died in 2019, her daughter found a box of letters from various admirers in her flat. These caught the imagination of Emilíana Torrini, who gazes into the camera to explain how the correspondence prompted her to write a collection of songs for her first album in a decade.

Geraldine (Caroline Catz) sits at a table in a mocked-up café and recalls how she had allowed herself to fall under the spell of a magician in Ankara. He performs a card trick for her, urges her to consort with extraordinary people, and reads from a letter in which the writer insists, `I am in withdrawal from you like a Prague junkie.' Another missive, read in monochrome by Richard Ayoade, compares her to an Australian wine that has to be sipped before the glass can be drained.

This leads into the first song, `Miss Flower', in which the band members are introduced by on-screen labels: Liam Hutton, Ian Kellett, Simon Byrt, Lovísa Elísabet Sigrúnardóttir, and Mara Carlyle. A montage of archival footage ensues, as a female voice describes the kind of men who wrote to Geraldine and their motives for so doing. Suddenly, Geraldine is being interrogated in a bright light because two agents are convinced that the terminology used in a letter (read by Siggi Baldursson) feels related to spycraft.

The band plays `Black Water', which segues into the seductive, but admonitory `Waterhole', with its reminders about messing up. As before, the song cross-cuts between studio shots and dance routines that are recorded with conspicuous camera trickery. Torrini asks Geraldine if the man who sent the letter was a spy and she confides that another chap, named Reggie (Mark Monero), might also have been involved in espionage. He had mentioned marrying her so that she could stay in the UK when her visa expired. But he had not proposed and wrote about the regret he had felt as her plane had taken off.

This takes us into `Dreamers', which Torrini pauses halfway through so she can consult with Geraldine about whether she loved Reggie or not. She admits that she had several lovers on the go and smiles at the tricks he had played on her. An extract from a letter about a 70 year-old lover who is 28ft long leads into `Lady K', a song about a boat that is accompanied by a variation on the sailors' hornpipe. This is followed by an intermission, in which a serpentine dance is mesmerisingly performed by Viva Seifert to a melancholic piano and a bowed saw tune entitled `Dreaming Through the Floorboards'.

A TV presenter (Alice Lowe) appears to fill in some of Geraldine's background. Her Australian father and Irish mother had met in London during the Second World War and she had been born in 1947. One of three siblings, she had been raised in Newcastle and Sydney, where she had attended Abbotsleigh, a progressive school for young ladies whose principal, Betty Archdale, had written Geraldine a testimonial commending her brightness and her likelihood to be a worthwhile individual once she settled down.

Coming to London, Geraldine became the centre of a group of friends and their good times are celebrated in `Black Lion Lane', which sees Torrini bopping between two dancers behind cardboard cut-out buildings (reminscent of much 1970s children's TV animation). Lowe informs us that Geraldine got work as a secretary at the Daily Telegraph before the Daily Express agreed to pay some of her expenses for a reporting trip to the Middle East. But a letter to her brother in Oz (read by Angus Sampson) reveals that all was not particularly well and Geraldine pops up languidly to smoke a cigarette while explaining that she had been busted by the cops for carrying a tiny amount of hash after a man she had met at the all-night post office in Trafalgar Square had snitched on her after she had refused his advances.

Torrini produces a cassette that contains a song written for Geraldine by a Jamaican admirer named Harold and his rocksteady vocal is incorporated into `Let's Keep Dancing'. However, the action rewinds for Lowe to announce that Geraldine had to return to Australia, where she became entangled with Scott (Nick Cave), who not only wrote her letters, but also bombarded her with telexes. Torrini and Catz read alternate words from some of these to form a kind of electronica poem. But nothing can match the desperation in Scott's message explaining how he can ejaculated inside another woman while thinking of Geraldine.

Torrini turns this into `The Golden Thread', which she follows by a speech to Geraldine, in which she explains that she had wanted something she had written to give her a presence on the album. In a fever dream, she has seen Geraldine with Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen and soon afterwards she found some verses written for Reggie, which inspired her to compose `Love Poem'.

With its psychedelic lava lamp visuals and a dance routine by choreographer Kate Coyne, this is the least distinctive of the songs, as the recurring refrain feels oppressive and the words aren't pliable enough to fit the dirge-like rhythm. Perhaps the pretentious reference to Joplin and Cohen breaks the spell the rest of the film exerts over the viewer - although the rewind sequence feels equally self-conscious.

Otherwise, Torrini's songtrack is beguiling and beautifully played by her band. The letters are read in an invitingly conversational manner that combines the familiarity of the language with the intimacy of the sentiments (which just occasionally spill over into unsettling infatuation). Nick Cave's delivery of Scott's emotionally wrought appeals for Geraldine to reciprocate his love is particularly effective, as is Catherine Catz's portrayal of Miss Flower, which brings to mind her self-directed performance in the excellent Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes (2020).

Using projections and props to explore a range of staging strategies, Forsyth and Pollard ensure this is as visually enticing as it is musically. Clearly the plan with writer Stuart Evers was to leave Geraldine as enigmatic as possible, while also alluding to the socio-sexual attitudes of the time. Perhaps more of a hint about the timeline might have been helpful, especially as Scott appears to refer to The Karate Kid, which was released in 1984. But this remains a poignant filial tribute that conveys Geraldine's personality through her capacity to inspire devotion.