15/07/2024 - In his second feature, Greek director Yannis Veslemes charts a psychedelic and hallucinogenic journey whose protagonists are trying to process the loss of a loved one

How do you accept the loss of a parent? Are the memories we have of that person real or embellished by way of our selective memory which tends to sugar-coat the facts? The protagonists of She Loved Blossoms More - the second feature film by Greek director Yannis Veslemes (not taking into account the ensemble film The Field Guide to Evil), which was selected for the Neûchatel International Fantastic Film Festival’s International Competition – take a decisively singular approach to coming to terms with such a traumatic event. The lead characters of this surreal drama with hallucinogenic undertones stop at nothing, so determined are they to bring their mother back to life, and defy the laws of nature with the stubbornness of siblings who have nothing left to lose. The film takes a courageous approach to tackling the still-taboo themes of ageing, madness and memory, a memory which often chooses to store only positive memories in order to protect us from the cruelty of the world.

She Loved Blossoms More follows the incredible ups and downs of three brothers (played by Panos Papadopoulos, Julio Giorgos Katsis and Aris Balis) who decide to build an unusual time machine in an attempt to bring their dead mother back to life. When their delirious and ambiguous father comes into the picture, their pseudo-scientific experiments go from bad to worse, and two of the brothers find themselves trapped in a hellish, psychedelic landscape. The past and the present meld together, resulting in an unsettling alternative reality where pain seems to crawl beneath their skin.

Veslemes’ movie is a surreal science-fiction comedy in which drugs become a character in and of themselves. In some sort of Greek-style re-visitation of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, the various substances explored (primarily hallucinogenics) help the three protagonists to distance themselves from a reality which they can’t accept and which they try to re-shape in any way they can. This descent into the hell of drugs turns into an initiatory journey through parallel worlds which are both fascinating and frightening in equal measure. Convinced they’ll be capable of bringing their mother back to life, the characters in this dazed and wonderfully incoherent adventure are prepared to tackle each and every initiatory rite that comes their way; the scene where two of the brothers smoke a hallucinogenic flower grown on their mother’s grave is unforgettable in this respect.

The strange creatures inhabiting the film are also intriguing, from the headless chicken to the father who’s transformed into a diabolical elf, without forgetting the double head of one of the brothers’ girlfriends, endowed with a third eye. It’s a shame that the roles of the only two female characters in this movie (the mother and the dealer girlfriend, the latter played by Sandra Abuelghanan) are merely sketched out, reducing them to spectators rather than genuine actresses in a story which touches them without ever really including them. But the power of the visual universe created by Yannis Veslemes is incredible: a surreal universe composed of hallucinogenic trips in which the protagonists are both prisoners and sorcerers’ apprentices. Theirs is a journey of apprenticeship based on unfamiliar rules which allow them to discover invisible worlds where the past and the present come together. She Loved Blossoms More takes a fascinating approach to blending the fantastical and the absurd, creating a dream-like world using everyday elements (a wardrobe which turns into a time machine or a chicken which turns into a headless mutant being), as if wanting to remind us that reality is far more complicated than we believe.

She Loved Blossoms More was produced by Blonde Audiovisual Productions (Greece), Faliro House Productions (Greece) and Rumble Fish Productions (France), and is sold worldwide by Yellow Veil Pictures.

(Translated from Italian)