Stick with The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, it pays off in spades
By Karl Quinn
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Amazon Prime Video from August 4
★★★★
Given how much flowers figure in this seven-episode adaptation of Holly Ringland’s bestselling 2018 novel, it is perhaps appropriate that it takes so long to bloom.
Just like the opening titles, in which a bouquet of native Australian flowers goes up in flames, this series from powerhouse producers Made Up Stories (Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, The Undoing) is a slow burn. It is heavy on lingering looks, characters poring over old letters and photos with an air of great ponderance, moody flashbacks and dark symbolism. So. Much. Symbolism.
Alycia Debnam-Carey as Alice in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.Credit: Amazon Prime Video
That lugubrious pacing can be frustrating, and is rather typical of a certain brand of prestige drama in the streaming age. But stick with it because when it finally does get there, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart pays off in spades.
Alycia Debnam-Carey, the Australian actor whose biggest successes to date have been in post-apocalyptic US sci-fi (The 100) and horror (Fear The Walking Dead), is the titular Alice, and is billed as a star of all seven episodes, though she doesn’t appear until the fourth. But when she does, it is with a burst of sudden anger that propels the plot into life.
June Hart (Sigourney Weaver) guards her flower farm, Thornfield, and her “flowers”, the women who come there to seek refuge.Credit: Amazon Prime Video
As a child (played by Alyla Browne), Alice dreams of setting her abusive father, Clem (Charlie Vickers), alight. But the blaze that consumes him on the family sugarcane farm also takes her beloved and heavily pregnant mother, Agnes (Tilda Cobham-Hervey).
In the aftermath of this domestic apocalypse, Alice is raised by her grandmother June (Sigourney Weaver) on a remote property called Thornfield, where abused women come to seek refuge and to tend the native plants June grows and sells. This ageing matriarch tends the women, too, calling them her flowers.
Tilda Cobham-Hervey as Agnes and Alyla Browne as the young Alice.Credit: Amazon Prime Video
A great keeper of secrets, June uses arrangements of plants in place of words to communicate. Alice learns the secret art of floriography at her knee, and grows up in a community of women – with June’s lover Twig (Leah Purcell) and adopted daughter Candy (Frankie Adams) chief among them – that not unreasonably views the male of the species as the enemy.
But when Alice uncovers one of her grandmother’s many secrets, it sends her out into the world – and ultimately into the desert – in fury.
There she finds purpose, working as a guide in an Indigenous community, and love, with fellow park ranger Dylan (Sebastian Zurita). But this idyll can’t last. Alice soon learns the past has a funny way of catching up with you, no matter how far you run.
Though never overtly articulated, there’s a running debate in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart about the pros and cons of cultivation – of people, especially. Is our nature as adults set by the circumstances of our birth? Can we outgrow our worst impulses? Can restraint or suppression bend a nature to a better shape, or only ever distort it to a worse one?
Secrets and lies, violence and abuse, the clingy tendrils of the past. The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a lot more thorn than blossom. But director Glendyn Ivin, writer Sarah Lambert, producers Jodi Matterson and Lucinda Reynolds, and a towering cast have crafted a mighty powerful arrangement all the same.
Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.
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