Ivana Miloš, Poppy of the Underworld (2022), monotype, gouache, and collage with poppy flower heads on paper.
SLEEPING BEAUTY
"And now my beauties, something with poison in it I think, with poison in it, but attractive to the eye and soothing to the smell . . . poppies, poppies, poppies will put them to sleep."
—The Wicked Witch of the West, The Wizard of Oz
Those who came back from the cave of Hypnos, god of sleep, couldn’t tell their kings and families waiting in the world above about its entrance, which was covered with bright red poppies drawing water from the flowing stream of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. They simply forgot or were found in a strange trance mumbling in foreign tongues, somnambulant shadows of their former selves, wearing a distant but happy smile on their petrified faces. When faced with the seductive, herbaceous plants, which tilted their head to the ground even if there was no breeze down in the cave, they pulled out the taproots along with the flowers from the ground and stuffed them into their leather bags to bring them to their old mothers whose suffering they could no longer bear. They knew that the milky juice of the poppy could be used to produce a substance that would relieve pain and aid in the escape from an insufferable world. They also remembered how Helen put a drug into Telemachus’ wine to ease his suffering and anger. It must have been the poppy juice, they said to themselves. But because they were simple men and they dreamed of even stronger effects, they ignored the dizziness that befell them when inhaling the faint scent of Hypnos’ poppies. Many of them died on their way up, for the poppies longed to go back into the underworld. The men just lay down on a rock, fell asleep, and never woke up again.
The opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) has served as a medicinal plant for 4,000 years. It has also killed millions. Tenderly. In the meantime, even without consuming narcotics, not only have we forgotten about the Underworld, but we constantly have to remind ourselves that there is a real world surrounding us, a planet made of life. Recently I had the pleasure of watching a tragic Georgian film that reconnected such an awareness of nature with profound knowledge of the Underworld. In its mesmerizing opening sequence, The Wishing Tree (1976) by Tengiz Abuladze shows a horse dying in a poppy field. It is clearly in agony but it doesn’t scream. As it fails to get up again, only the rustling whisper of grass and flowers, as well as a circling hawk screeching far above in the sky, break the silence. A young boy watches the scene and runs away through the field. The camera follows him with a pan that creates a flickering sensation of red blossoms popping up on the screen.
Poppies exist in other colors but whenever it gets symbolic, for example in relation to remembrance or defeating Nazism, we turn to their red, the stains of blood and wine we can’t get rid of.
“(…) we love each other like poppy and memory, / we sleep like wine in the seashells, / like the sea in the moon’s blood-beam (…)"
—“Corona,” Paul Celan
The boy in The Wishing Tree finds the young farmer Gedia, who runs to discover his suffering horse. Gedia kneels beside the animal, caresses it, and whispers to it in the fearful but affectionate voice we only speak when we know it is too late. All of this is so full of allegorical meaning that interpreting it would take away the weight of the images. The film easily exceeds the critical line in which symbols and metaphors are readable as such. Instead, it overfills each image with possible meanings, leaving me no other choice but to translate the images back to reality because it’s reality that shares such an excess, such an ecstasy of elucidation. Gedia’s uncle arrives at the scene and decides to kill the suffering horse. As Gedia falls to the ground in desperation, the camera pans down and suddenly the view is blocked by a poppy. All red, all death.
The loose adaptation of several short stories by Giorgi Leonidze is the central piece of the director’s triptych—following The Plea (1967) and preceding Repentance (1984)—dealing with the powerlessness of humans facing life and death. The Wishing Tree is set in a pre-revolutionary Georgian village and, just like Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood or Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, it deals with the different ways, opinions, dreams, mistakes, and desires of the inhabitants of a remote place torn between melancholy traditionalism and destructive progressivism. At least to my admittedly limited understanding of the politics involved, the film doesn’t take sides. Abuladze is interested in contradictions and concurrences—where love and anger, vanity and grief, and laughter and pain, could appear at the same time within the same emotion. The director shows the absurdity that comes of people trying to organize themselves according to ideas and ambitions when the earth they are living on asks for care and humility. However, he also demonstrates the brutal blindness of naive traditionalism.
The film's opening images are reminiscent of Dorothy falling asleep in the poppy field in The Wizard of Oz (1939). The Wishing Tree is indeed one of those films that at first appears to be as if dreamed in the moment we are watching it; a fairy tale, yet it doesn’t feature any magic or didactic moral lessons. What it does feature is people’s need for magic and morals in order to understand, to stay in contact with their surroundings, and to be able to travel to the Underworld to meet their deceased loved ones.
Here are some examples from the film: The grass is poisoned. The soil turns against the people. A man is looking for the eponymous wishing tree. It must grow somewhere, mustn’t it? If you eat cucumbers you will stay young. The train will bring light and hope. If you sing, there will be less pain. If you dive deep enough, you will catch the golden fish.
There are many potential fairy tales in The Wishing Tree but, sadly, none of them are true. Naturally, the same can be said about the doomed love story between Gedia and Marita, a young and beautiful woman from a poor family. When sitting in a field she tells her lover, “Everything around us is alive. Everything has a soul. In spring the earth laughs with flowers.” However, many people never learn to appreciate beauty. Marita is forced to marry a shepherd. However, she continues seeing Gedia. In winter they both get killed for the crime of loving each other. Then, the earth doesn’t laugh anymore—it’s angry. Torrential rain falls on the fields burying the dying lovers in mud. The world is neither judged by beauty nor by truth. But it is ruled by fear and made-up laws. There is no better world, alas; we have to try to make it in this one.
Nevertheless, there is the world’s beauty, isn’t there? Spring always returns, poppies re-emerge. To explain this, Abuladze turns for inspiration to Persephone, daughter of Demeter, who roamed in a poppy field picking those scarlet colored stars—as innocently as Marita sat with Gedia in the grass—on the very day her uncle Hades abducted her to the Underworld. Like history, myths repeat themselves. When Demeter finally found her daughter, she learned that Persephone had eaten the seeds of the pomegranate Hades had given her and thus could not return to the living world. Zeus decided that she would spend half a year above ground with her mother (the time we know as spring, when crops grow) and half a year with Hades (the time when Earth goes to sleep). Abuladze parallels Persephone’s journey at the end of The Wishing Tree. Once more, out of the gray, muddy images of death, images of blooming poppies and a pomegranate emerge. Persephone returns to Demeter, Marita returns to Gedia, beauty returns to life, poppies return to the field. We can hear the narrator:
“Last spring I went to look at the place where Marita used to live. Everything around it has withered and there was silence. Where the house had been, there were ruins, with no trees left. And only at the place of the former hearth a pomegranate tree grew up by itself and broke into fiery blossom. Shining with radiant light before me, as though smiling like Marita’s face, was a newly opened pomegranate flower. I was looking at that scarlet flower and could not believe that Marita was no longer adorning our earth. It was hard to believe that this gorgeous tree could grow up in that dust and debris. Where does beauty come to the world from? Where does it go? Or maybe it’s just hiding its face from us for a while?”
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.