Broken Flowers mini-review

A still from Broken Flowers: Don Johnston and his long lost son (?) having lunch.

This film pro­vid­ed what I expect­ed of it: a typ­i­cal apa­thet­ic look­ing Bill Mur­ray who finds him­self in var­i­ous bizarre sit­u­a­tions. The film seems to be about noth­ing, and lead nowhere, but in the end you find it under your skin, some of its images lin­ger­ing. I par­tic­u­lar­ly like the way in which the set­up (Mur­ray as John­ston receives a let­ter from an unknown ex-part­ner) has you con­stant­ly look­ing for clues as to who of the four women is the moth­er of John­ston’s alleged son. It plays on and por­trays the way the human brain des­per­ate­ly looks for pat­terns in ran­dom phe­nom­e­na — any­thing pink is loaded with sig­nif­i­cance, just because the ini­tial let­ter is pink. Recommended.

(Also, the jazzy, “Ethiopi­an” music is very nice as well.)

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Kars Alfrink

Kars is a designer, researcher and educator focused on emerging technologies, social progress and the built environment.