The Extraordinary Miss Flower: from a suitcase of old love letters, a charming musical fantasy emerges

In an era when romantic missives have shrunk to the late-night ‘U up?’ text, it’s easy to see how a suitcase of elaborate love letters from the 1960s and 70s fired the imagination of singer Emilíana Torrini. Discovered by her friend Zoe Flower (who is the film’s producer) after her mother Geraldine’s death in 2018, these heady, horny epistles from Geraldine’s many boyfriends inspired Torrini to write a suite of songs that forms the basis of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s playful, multilayered performance film. With a narrative composed of fond, nostalgic fantasies about Geraldine’s groovy life, it feels like a cousin to 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), Forsyth and Pollard’s elegantly experimental documentary about Nick Cave. That also featured a mix of tall tales, songs and biography, albeit on a larger scale than this intimate, studiobound production. Cave pops up here too, one of several celebrities reading out yearning letters with brio, while Torrini turns each fervent message into a breathy trip hop ballad.

It’s also a film about creativity and inspiration, which places itself inside Torrini’s restless imagination. After poring over the smudged letters, the singer seizes on the smallest clues to cast Geraldine’s lovers as spies, poets and broken-hearted Lotharios. Her enthusiastic mythologising of Flower’s affairs is bolstered by the film’s structure, an enticing layer-cake of readings, sensual songs, kaleidoscopic dance interludes and teasing micro-stories. Actress Caroline Catz plays Geraldine, conjured up from faded 1970s snapshots to be quizzed by Torrini. Her feline performance here recalls the equally playful archive-based documentary Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes (2020), which Catz directed and starred in. Alice Lowe’s cameo as an earnest 1960s TV presenter laying out Geraldine’s biography, adds a winkingly funny note among the heartfelt letters and torrid telexes.

Forsyth and Pollard divide Torrini’s song performances between a band-filled recording studio and some minimal sets (a whimsical cardboard boat, a giant frame filling latex skirt symbolising a ‘ black lake’ of lust). However, despite the directors’ visual ingenuity, the songs’ sultry, whispered phrases and smooth sounds occasionally feel a tad samey. Still, the film’s clever use of archive footage and in-camera effects, together with a charmingly self reflexive tone, give it verve as well as nostalgic glamour. Sad though, that only one delightfully erotic letter survives to give us the extraordinary Miss Flower’s own take on her wild years.

► The Extraordinary Miss Flower is in UK cinemas now.