FNC – Human Flowers of Flesh

Nouveaux Alchimistes

Ida, an inveterate wanderer, lives on a sailboat with a crew of five men. While anchored off Marseille, she hears of the French Foreign Legion and its former headquarters in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria. She immediately charts a course for this new destination, a place as much about colonial history as it is about artistic fantasy, from Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor from Gibraltar to Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (Wittmann even has Denis Lavant appear at the film’s key moment). A bewitchingly sensory odyssey, the sun-dappled second feature from the director of Drift (FNC 2017) is immersive, elliptical and allusive, its hypnotic pace leaving plenty of room for meditation on the fleeting nature of history and place.