Les fleurs du mal

Charles Baudelaire was one of the giants of 19thcentury French poetry and he earned his position among that nations luminaries through the poems in one slim volume entitled Les Fleurs du Mal Flowers of Evil A perfectionist to the extreme he struggled with every word of those few poems for many years before he consented to see them published When he did six of them were condemned by the state censors as obscene It was surely a powerful blow to him to have such a significant part of his lifes work so rudely suppressed This courtroom drama follows him at the 1857 trial at which he defended his works The filmmaker has chosen to symbolically reenact certain poems about the love of a woman as they are being read for the court It is easy to imagine that as was certainly the case for the trial of Oscar Wilde in England this courtroom trial was a form of punishment for his publicly dissolute lifestyle