Man of Flowers

A lonely, middle-aged art collector pays a young artist's model to ritually strip for his voyeuristic pleasure every week (to an aria from Donizetti's 'Lucia di Lammermoor'). Gradually he becomes unwillingly involved in her messy private life, and as his psychotherapy continues, we learn about the relationship of his fantasies to his obsession with his dead mother. Cox's film, handsome indeed for its modest budget, and not at all the dirty-old-man-buys-sex-object story the above suggests, is quite unlike any film to have emerged from Australia. Cox achieves a difficult balance between a quirkily individual sense of humour, and a more poignant, serious sense of purpose about the privacy of our fantasy lives and our essential loneliness, which is right on target. A genuine oddity.