'Flower' Is Thorny But Rootless
Max Winkler's tale of a teenager who uses sex to get revenge on a man who may or may not have assaulted her step-brother is a "glib character study" that tries too hard to shock.
In 1960, the great Japanese director Nagisa Oshima made , his second feature, about a rebellious young couple who perform sexual shakedowns on middle-aged men. Their M.O. is simple: She seduces, he robs. At the time, Oshima offered the film as a quick-and-dirty analog to the nascent French New Wave, with the couple representing a lost generation given to rebellion and criminality. Even when he made period pieces later in his, or his 1990 swan song, (), about homosexuality among 19th-century samurai, Oshima was consistently attuned to society's less visible, occasionally aberrant youths.
