The
capital of the 1960s flower children was San Francisco. Some
hippies spurned the urban existence and established communal
settlements in Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate
Bridge, living simply with vegetables on their property. One
of the attractions was free love, and some love children were
born, but not all were prepared to be responsible parents.
In Wildflowers, directed and written semiautobiographically
by Melissa Painter, we follow the quest of seventeen-year-old
Cally (played by Clea DuVall) in the year 1985, a time when
one might have asked, "Where have all the flowerchildren gone?"
Born in 1968, Cally was abandoned as a baby by her mother
Sabine (played by Daryl Hannah) in a commune and adopted by
spaced-out Wade (played by Tomas Arana), who believed that
he was the birthfather and reared Cally on a Sausalito houseboat
as best he could. For Cally, the time has come to become an
adult woman. She has many boyfriends but is a freckle-faced
tomboy, lacking a female role model, with considerable talent
as a maternalistic babysitter. Her birthmother, according
to Wade, left for the East in order to go underground because
she was pursued by police for possession of a large amount
of marijuana. At a dance concert, Cally spots an attractive
woman about thirty-four years of age. She again spots the
intense woman with long blonde hair in hippie again in City
Lights Bookstore. She then becomes obsessed with finding out
more about the woman, an artist who lives in a house in San
Francisco with only a dog for companionship. The slow-moving
film focuses on Cally’s gradual realization that the woman
she admires so much is actually her birthmother. The movie,
in short, indicates that some hippies were still trying to
pursue lives of detachment from the materialistic world around
them in 1985, while the rest settled down to conventional
lives with their children and their middle-class occupations.
Children of the hippies who grew up without both birthparents,
however, have an angst that aches for redemption and a feeling
that their inscrutable parents lived in a more idyllic era
that is now a fading memory. Thus, the film can be interpreted
as a nostalgic plea for hippie mothers and fathers to reach
out to their long-lost children, and vice versa, in order
to achieve a healing that will permit the younger generation
to overcome fundamental obstacles that prevent them from leading
happy, mature, and productive lives. The film can also be
appreciated as a retrospective monument to an experiment in
human relationships that went aground when narcissism replaced
idealism. MH
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