“Human Flowers of Flesh”, a lot of images for nothing

Arrived at the first half of the international competition of the 75th Locarno Film Festival, here is the first pensum auteurist from which we emerge speechless. At the opposite extreme of the Portuguese Carlos Conceicao, who in Brave Nation manages to evoke a lot by showing very little, one wonders what the German Helena Wittmann wanted to do with Human Flowers of Flesh – literally “the human flowers of flesh”. Surrounded by five men from different countries, Ida sails in the Mediterranean, somewhere between Marseille and Corsica. She could be a marine botanist, or something like that. One day, one of his acolytes tells him the story of a legionnaire who swam until he almost died of exhaustion. And here is Ida obsessed with the Foreign Legion and the mysterious legends surrounding it.