The Bloom of Yesterday

The blooms of yesterday? What blooms is the present: beautiful, fresh, alive — and doomed. Flowers die, beauties fade. Blooms are either now or preserved in our memories, what we remember of them, not as they survive pressed flat, dry and dead between pages or in a frame.

This film’s blooms of yesterday are what grew out of the seeds planted in the past. In this case the seeds in question are the Holocaust. The blooms that blossomed from them are the central romantic couple, Totila Blumen and Zazie Lindau. They have differing but connected blooms, outgrowths, of the Holocaust seed. His grandfather killed her grandmother. Indeed, he slaughtered all the Jews from his old class at school. 

This film sparks against earlier films. This Blumen in love evokes George Segal in Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love even if only in name. The madcap Zazie springs from Louis Malle’s eponymous film of an anarchist female spirit, here exploring a psychological version of the original’s Metro underground. 

As a couple they evoke Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the screwball comedy  Bringing Up Baby. (Spoiler alert: she indeed does end up bringing up his baby.) He is the dour, fumbling academic and she is the madcap force of nature. Inevitably, as opposites meet cute and attract, they fall in love. The “baby” in this film is not the living jungle animal but the dead eternal Holocaust. It can’t be tamed or sung to or leashed and it should not be forgotten. 

But the Holocaust that drew them together inevitably drives them apart. For in its aftermath, normal romance, normal fictions, normal relationships whether in life or in genre, cannot slip comfortably into any usual pattern. The characters have to find their own ways to deal with the monstrous past. The Holocaust makes normal normalcy inconceivable.   

Totie, a scholar of the Holocaust, struggles to stage a symposium that his just-dead mentor planned. Zazie is the French intern assigned to him. She loves him for his published work and as a model of the modern German breaking free from the nation’s antisemitism. 

She’s also having an affair with the married Balthazar, whom the mentor promoted over Totie because of Totie’s raging temper. Love and politics pointedly converge. 

Totie’s rage turns out to be directed as much against himself as against Balthazar. That may also be the cause of his impotence. Unable to satisfy the wife he loves, he encourages her to have sex with strangers. That only feeds his self-hatred.

Zazie snaps him out of his impotence. Despite their instinctive antagonism, they fall in love and plan to run away together. But learning that Totie was himself a Nazi drives Zazie away.

Their last meeting in the department store at Christmas is wrenching. Zazie says she has a a woman partner and introduces her five-year-old son “Maurice,” blond like Totie. But Totie’s adopted daughter heard her call him by another name, the pet name the lovers used when they joked about him impregnating her their one night together. Whatever his name, he is the bloom of that five-year-old seed — which Totie can now only futilely pursue. 

  Generation after generation has to confront the Holocaust, by themselves for themselves. Zazie moves on to her own new life and raising her son. Totie is reconnected to his wife and — edging away from his violent focus on the Holocaust — working on other, international issues of bigotry and the suppression of a people.  Like Canada and its Indians. 
     In the screwball comedies the quarrelling heroes fall in love and wed. But not here, not in the shadow of the Holocaust. Conventions don’t apply now. Totie and Zazie have to pass through each other to find themselves.