- Actors: Norman Kaye, Alyson Best, Chris Haywood, Sarah Walker (II), Julia Blake
- Directors: Paul Cox
- Classification: 18
- Studio: Art House
- VHS Release Date: 24 Jan 2000
- Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- ASIN: B00004CJI0
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 22,987 in Video (See Top 100 in Video)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
Saw this back in the 8o's when it first came out.It stuck in my mind somehow and I decided to see if I could trace a copy on DVD.Managed to source a copy thru a US Amazon supplier.Really enjoyed seeing it again.It is a poignant and quirky film about lonlieness and supressed emotions .The lead characters are really well acted (but one or two of the secondary characters are perhaps a little weak.)
The flashbacks to the childhood of the main character are masterly in my opinion, and show how the repressive father and emotionally distant mother trigger the development of the confused and tangled sexual feelings in the boy to be later played out in the voyeurism of his adulthood and his love of flowers (rather than people)
Wonderful soundtrack music from Lucia De Lammermoor in early part of the film.Looking back I think this is what got me interested in Opera.
Paul Cox seems to have been quite prolific but not that well known--will seek out some of his other films.
The flashbacks to the childhood of the main character are masterly in my opinion, and show how the repressive father and emotionally distant mother trigger the development of the confused and tangled sexual feelings in the boy to be later played out in the voyeurism of his adulthood and his love of flowers (rather than people)
Wonderful soundtrack music from Lucia De Lammermoor in early part of the film.Looking back I think this is what got me interested in Opera.
Paul Cox seems to have been quite prolific but not that well known--will seek out some of his other films.
4 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:VHS Tape
After the mainstream success of his 1982 Lonely Hearts, Paul Cox went arthouse for this film, a meditation on art, religion, sex and death. Norman Kaye plays a vampire-like recluse, who dresses like a priest and is described as "something the world has lost". Independently wealthy, he collects beautiful things and has a flower fetish. This fetish extends to regular visits by Alyson Best, whom he calls"his little flower" and who strips for his pleasure. Best is also associated with Chris Hayward, a manipulative abstract painter. The scenario is credited to Cox, with dialogue by Bob Ellis, who appears in an amusing scene as Kaye's South African-accented anaylst. The treatment tries to legitimise Kaye by demonstrating that everyone else has their own eccentricities, but no one else has dream flashbacks in super8 stock, where even as a child, Kaye seems strange. Cox overdoes the use of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, so that the slight tale of grand guignol that he aims for is flooded in overindulgence, with only small redeeming qualities - the stilted body language of Werner Herzog as the father in flashback, and the lack of eye contact given by the priest of the church where Kaye plays the organ in demonic chords.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Charming and unique.
20 May 2002
Format:DVD
"Man of Flowers" shows a few months from the life of a man who as the result of childhood traumas has become devoid of the need for human relationships, and consequently, never developed social skills necessary to build and sustain them. Being thus freed from the hang-up on relationships, he has become rarefied, and has escaped instead into the safety of another hang-up - beauty in its various forms: flowers, music, human body in painting and sculpture. He's not unhappy, but he is considered to be so, and to cure this perceived suffering he is in psychotherapy. As part of it, he's told to build relationships, and he tries to, clumsily and hilariously, with quite unlikely characters: his therapist, postman, long-deceased mother, construction contractor. None of those are real and normal relationships, and as he fails to see that, and lacks the sense of danger, he is easy prey to manipulators. He also has an on-going acquaintance with a young and pretty girl - an artists' model. At first glance it looks like this one might be a normal relationship, but on his side it's nothing more than an acquaintance - he doesn't see the girl as a person, but merely as an object of beauty (his "flower"). He doesn't do it out of ill will, he simply doesn't have a need, or an idea, for anything more. The girl, on the other hand, becomes fond of him, increasingly more so as her relationship with her junkie boyfriend deteriorates. He turns down her offer of living together, and proves to be more protective than fond of her by solving her boyfriend problem in a truly ingenious way.
A charming movie, portraying a man who's not "from Mars" but perhaps from Jupiter.
A charming movie, portraying a man who's not "from Mars" but perhaps from Jupiter.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
A Real Gem!
11 Mar 2002
Format:DVD
It's a rare thing to see a film that so unabashedly (without being over-sentimental!) reveals an individual's need to fulfil his desire for aesthetic beauty. This is a quiet, honest film that is a 'must see' for people who also share a great love for art and music. I wish they made more films like this!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
man of flowers
5 May 2011
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
A rather dated Australian film but I enjoyed it as much as the first time I saw it. Some wonderful vignettes and rich colour
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