New streaming on Screambox from Yellow Veil Pictures!
Directed by Yannis Veslemes.
Written by Dimitris Emmanouilidis, Yannis Veslemes.
Check out the trailer here!!
A trio of young brothers (Panos Papadopoulos, Aris Balis, and Julio Katsis) attempt to build a Time Machine to go back in time and save their mother from a devastating car wreck. Funded by their father Logo (DELICATESSEN’s Dominique Pinon), the kids are making bold strides in making this happen, but seem to have trouble finishing the process, causing the lab animal to split into two or disappear altogether. When a young woman named Samantha (Sandra Abuelghanam) comes to visit the boys, she becomes the perfect opportunity for them to test the process on a human subject.
SHE LOVED BLOSSOMS MORE is a strange one. Visually, the film is stunning. Everything, even the interiors in the three brothers’ lab, feels dream-like and this could be a metaphor for the brothers’ persistent dream to get their mother back. These guys feel trapped in amber—in a dream state. As if all they do is dedicate their waking hours on making this time machine and spend the rest of the time doing drugs, having sex, and lounging around. There’s a Gaspar Noe feel to this film where the lighting is extreme and seems to change with the mood. These are less than characters and more like a group of people who, when they are not distracted by drugs, music, eating, or fucking, they eventually get around to the plot. There’s this overwhelming decadence of no rules happening here that reminded me of KIDS, where these young people are sitting around doing whatever they want with no supervision and getting into the worst trouble possible.
The morality of this film is in the gutter. There basically is none to speak of. These guys are three geniuses, attempting to do the impossible, and willing to do any kind of drug or mind-altering experience to stretch their brains to do so. When they let loose and party, they go on drug and alcohol binges, sleep where they fall, wake up, and get right back to work. It’s revealed later that their father is sort of funding this operation, but there really is no outside world other than this mansion covered by vines and strange plant life. And as far as sex, the brothers really don’t have any boundaries. Samantha shows up as the girlfriend of one brother, but immediately another brother shows interest and while one brother is passed out, Samantha moves on to the next brother and seduces him. There’s no moral compass to any of the characters in this film and it really was off-putting for me, causing me to dislike pretty much every character on screen. They toss their pets into the time machine and don’t seem to care and anyone who treats animals that way are automatically assholes in my book. I don’t know if this is a cultural thing. Who knows what the French see as right and wrong, but there’s a hedonistic feel to this world that didn’t sit well with me.
And it made me check out of the film. Yes, it is compelling as to whether the brothers are going to get what they want and pluck their mother out of the past to safety. But when you don’t care about any of the characters, it’s hard to care about the movie. The only sympathetic person in the film is Samantha, who is literally torn apart by the time machine and these brothers’ callousness. But before she get atomized, Samantha flits around from one brother to another, without a care about how it might drive a wedge between the brothers, so she is less than innocent as well.
Many are going to recommend SHE LOVES BLOSSOMS MORE because of the groundbreaking special effects. There’s a duck that walks around without a front half. There’s a woman split in half and still alive. There’s a giant headed demon nestled in the middle of a dream. It all is wonderfully demented. But without some kind of moral core to the story, none of that made a difference to me. Sorry, I just didn’t like this one. I really don’t know what it is trying to say with the way the characters act with one another and worse yet, I don’t care. SHE LOVES BLOSSOMS MORE is beautiful and surreal at times, but rotten in its core.
