![]() ![]() ![]() “It’s not September anymore,” the septuagenarian says with bittersweet self-awareness, just before he’s shown wielding a scythe to prepare a garden for renewal. The film regards not just the seasons of the year but the seasons of Oudolf’s life. His emphasis on the changing seasons highlights the ways the gardens adapt and thrive. His multihued drawings are a delightful cross of simplicity and sophistication (and the eventual subject of an exhibition), and Piper effectively connects the studio work to the field work, when the selected shrubs and herbs and grasses are set in the ground. Piper opens the film, intriguingly, with the scratch of markers on drafting paper as Oudolf sketches a new garden plan. A complex, dimensional portrait of Oudolf never quite emerges, though, and the brief doc, however lovely, lacks an essential dynamism that would make it truly compelling. “And I let them perform.”Įvocatively scored by David Thor Jonsson and Charles Gansa, and handsomely shot by the director, the film is, at its strongest, an inspiring sensory immersion in that performance, one in which the (mostly unidentified) plants are the stars. ![]() It’s a curated wildness “I put plants onstage,” Oudolf says. As he follows Oudolf’s travels through Europe and the States to completed projects and works-in-progress, director Thomas Piper illuminates the striking, seemingly rough-hewn beauty of his subject’s landscapes. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |