Man of Flowers

An elderly, wealthy and eccentric man lives inside an order of his own making. As he sees it there are three things in life that are truly beautiful. One is collecting art, one is collecting flowers, and the third is watching women undress. He pays for that and has made a ritual of it. The film neither approves the wish nor offers it merely as perversion; what it shows is the man’s loneliness. The account stands between humour and discomfort. How the relation between the woman and the man gets built is the real subject. The ninety one minutes pass inside that arrangement. Norman Kaye and Alyson Best take the leads, with Werner Herzog also in the cast. Paul Cox’s Australian film was completed in 1983.