A must for Gardeners Anonymous! A delight for those gardeners who are not anonymous! And for those, like this reviewer, who are not gardeners at all, a very pleasant entertainment.
There is something about the status of the rose amongst all the flowers of creation. There is beauty, there is colour, there are the colours and blends, there are petals and shapes… And, they are certainly to the forefront in this story of the cultivation of roses, the creation of beautiful hybrids, fields of roses, greenhouses specialties, and the drama of exhibitions and competitions.
In the 2019 film, Perfumes, there was an emphasis on the wonders of scents – and a rather prim expert and her dependence on her chauffeur. Perfumes could be something of a cousin to The Rose Maker.
However, there is nothing prim about the characters here. Actually, they are rather rough diamonds, emphasis on diamond emerging from the rough. Again, the central character is a middle-aged woman, Eve (Catherine Frot), no husband, no children, only the heritage from her beloved father of cultivating roses. And she has a devoted assistant, Vera (actress-writer Olivia Cote), who has really sacrificed herself to try to keep the Rose cultivation market financially afloat.
There is a villain of the piece, a rose entrepreneur, who is in it for the business side, the prestige at continually winning competitions, relying on his assistants for their creativity in producing a new rose year by year. He has his eye on Eve’s business and would like to buy her out. He offers a position for her to work for him.
But Vera makes contact with a company who place workers who are looking for jobs. So, three different types arrive to work in the fields and the greenhouses, a 50-year-old man who is certainly looking for security, a young woman who is rather slow but delights in creativity in the roses, a young man, surly, abandoned by his parents when he was a child, in and out of jail for burglary.
We know they are going to bond – and the young man is going to discover that he has expert olfactory abilities, knows his scents and is able to remember the details.
However, Eve does rely on them for a bit of their criminal talent in order to upstage the entrepreneur.
So, delight in looking at the roses, the process of hybridisation (now there’s a word to add to vocabulary!), the changes over the seasons of the year (including a dramatic hailstorm), ingenuity to go out into the market to sell roses to boost the finances.
We hope that all will work out well – and it is quite a pleasing experience to watch the roses in this company. And some wonderful close-ups of the flowers during the final credits.
France, 2020, 95 minutes, Colour.
Catherine Frot, Manel Foulgoc, Fatsah Bouyahmed, Olivia Cote, Marie Petiot, Vincent Dedienne.
Directed by Pierre Pinaud.
Reviewed by Fr. Peter Malone, MSC
Worth Pondering... 