Flowers of Romance
Joel Hoglund
14.10.2011 - David Dusa is a
worldly guy. He was born in Hungary, grew up in South Africa,
studied film in Sweden, lives in France, and could pass for a New
York hipster. He made a movie about an Algerian guy who falls in
love with an Iranian girl at a Parisian hotel. The movie is full of
Apple computers and iPods and smartphones and Twitters and
Facebooks, break dancing and bouncy music. David Dusa is a guy who
knows how to tap into the raw energy of young people, wherever in
the world they might be, and of the great new democratic
communication medium they have used to change everything about the
world we live in - the way we express ourselves artistically, the
way we fight oppression and even the way we fall in love.
That Dusa, following a string of successful shorts, could have
made a fine film about two young people trying to forge a
relationship in the Internet Age there's no doubt. But given his
inherently international slant on the world, he didn't stop there.
With Flowers of Evil, he has made a great film that sets an
Internet Age romance squarely in the context of one of the most
important events in recent Middle East history.
Flowers opens on a typically laissez-faire young guy in
his late teens, Rachid (Rachid Youcef, all the better in the role
for being a non-pro first-time actor), on his way to the swanky
Paris hotel where he works as a bellhop. Along the way he records
his parkour moves on a
handheld camera to upload later to the Web. Meanwhile Anahita
(Alice Belaidi), a college student from Tehran, is checking in at
the hotel. At her parents' insistence, she has fled Iran.
The year is 2009, and in the wake of the disputed elections, young
protestors are taking to the streets in numbers not seen since the
Islamic Revolution of 1979. With the conventional press silenced by
the government, citizens armed with mobile cameras and smartphones
are acting as guerrilla journalists, spreading massive calls to
action via Twitter and uploading amateur videos of the bloody
fallout to YouTube.
It is at this historic real-life crossroads that Dusa has the
fictional Rachid and Anahita meet and - hesitantly, accidentally -
fall in love. But in the Internet Age that's not so easy. Anahita
stays glued to either her computer or her smartphone, obsessively
tracking her friends on the bloody frontlines of the protests
through startling online video footage. She struggles to prevent
the turmoil in Iran from contaminating their budding romance, but
she feels guilty for each tender moment spent with Rachid. In the
Internet Age, Anahita doesn't have to merely imagine that her
friends back home are fighting and dying for their rights, she must
suffer watching the brutality unfold in the streets in real time
online.
"The desire to tell this story was born from the desire of the
Iranian people to tell theirs," says Dusa. He began collecting the
hundreds of real amateur videos and blog texts that would wind up
in Flowers of Evil in June 2009. The combined fire of
outraged young people and their coordinated use of electronic media
seemed to herald another inevitable revolution. But in the Internet
Age our attention spans are short, and it's easy to overload on
information. By setting an intimate, beautifully acted love story
on the canvas of a political event that people in other countries
could find hard to understand, he makes it something personal,
something we cannot ignore, and should never forget.