There is always an integrative purpose in the way we encounter it Isaki Lacusa The documentary genre, which here signifies this film with the documentary filmmaker as well Elena Molina. Overall, his work in documentary links him to music … Art, cinema, race, fantasy itself…, but always looking for a title just for the name of the genre. “Flowers for Antonio” is a documentary that can be described as elegiac, reverential, sentimental, or in some ways, sacred and cathartic.
It is, yes, a film by Elena Molina and Esaki La Cuesta, but it is rather a film by Alba Flores, the actress and singer who was banned from singing and the daughter of Antonio Floreswho died when she was eight years old, is now searching, thirty years later, for that cathartic experience of knowing, understanding, and feeling sorry for her family’s history of “Pharaohs.” The result, shown in the film, is a very interesting spell that allows us to enter a very deep zone of feelings and the need to fill a huge void like an abyss. “I was a girl and I was a little angry with him when he died,” she confesses as soon as the film begins.
The title of Flores is, in a way, a world in our place and in our last century, presenting his memory and his family album before the camera of La Cuesta y Molina, and it is Alba, the last or penultimate installment of Flores, that charts an emotional and sensitive path for the journey of this honest story, which recognizes two ambitions: a concert in honor of Antonio prepared by his widow Ana Vela, in which Alba, who has stopped singing, will have to perform the aria of the effort of singing, and the second ambition is to become A movie, something to watch as we go along.
Entering the world of Flores means encountering what José María Beman described to Lola Flores, “a whirlwind of colours”, the pinnacle of power, art and talent around which the world danced; But it also means entering something like a family sanctuary where all its members have in their genes, in the record of their lives, a pending reckoning with eternity: one is not Flores without having a tattoo of the lineage of the Pharaohs.
Light and dark
Alba drives this ship, but her aunts, Lolita and Rosario, move her hand to the helm and tell her, discover and show her (that is, they do it to all of us) the wonderful and winding path of the family, of the great moments but also of the absolute darkness through which they have passed. There is a lot of private archival material, photographs, Super 8 family film, and above all a lot of sensitive material that situates and magnifies the character of Antonio, the favorite son, the purest poet, the self-destructive artist, the orphan child who could not stand even two weeks with his dead mother.
Although it is full of sadness and melancholy, it is not a sad film, and the always happy and exciting spirit of the Flores family did not allow it to do so even in the face of the blows of fate, always imprinted on their faces, Lolita or Rosario, with that doomed joy that is as close to tears as it is to the faces of a joke. The direction of the story, which focuses on the mysterious greatness of Antonio, his genius and his devil, and the catharsis of his daughter Alba, “the flower I always wanted in my garden”, in her search and confrontation, gets its fruits immediately: great interest follows, with curiosity turning into enthusiasm and with the constant digestion of that lump in the throat when working or presenting images with only noble materials. There are moments, in some of which the cultured voice of Alba (Sylvia Pérez Cruz) sings, which impresses, and there are other moments in which the daily life of parents, children, grandparents… appears on the screen with a little nostalgia, reaching a happy and enjoyable sadness.
And the way it makes you feel “Flowers for Antonio” So steeped in emotion and tenderness, it’s a real surprise at the ways in which Isaki La Cuesta usually packages his films, always somewhat reluctant to allow himself to be “poisoned” by emotions that might seem conventional. Although the truth is that the traditional term does not exist in the world of the Flores family, because they inflate it with truth, and legitimacy, which makes it exceptional.