I’m glad I’m not a prestigious limited TV drama. It looks exhausting. Such is the faint but persistent feeling that comes with watching The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (the slightly laborious title being the perfect foreshadow of the entire experience). It is good – it is – but, crikey, you can feel every ounce of effort that has gone into making it so.
Every scene is gorgeously shot and dripping with meaning, rife with Symbolism-with-a-capital-S, suffused with evocations of memories and studded with seeds of future plotlines. It is a story built around secrets and you can hardly move for hints. But once you get used to this thickly portentous vibe, there is plenty to admire.
Based on Holly Ringland’s bestselling book of the same name, this is a tale of the enduring suffering caused by male violence against women, and the manifold ways men harm. One of the things it gets absolutely right, and for which it abandons its slightly blurry feel and pulls everything into sharp focus, is how it shows threat, the ever-present fear of violence erupting even at ostensibly happy moments, and the terrible injury when it does. The Lost Flowers shows domestic abuse to be the terrorism that it is.
We begin with eponymous nine-year-old Alice (Alyla Browne) dreaming of setting her father, Clem, on fire and freeing her family. Her mother, Agnes, is pregnant for a second time and running away has become an even fainter hope than before. When Alice accidentally starts a fire in Clem’s woodshed, it spreads to the house and kills both her parents. Local librarian Sally (Asher Keddie), who had been the first to alert authorities to the possibility that the child and her mother were being abused, wants to take her in. But Alice, mute with trauma, is put into the care of her formidable grandmother, June, played by Sigourney Weaver in a rare sighting outside the Avatar franchise, and who is on quietly blazing form.
June owns and runs a flower farm that secretly doubles as a refuge for women (known as “the Flowers”, which is one of a few teeth-itching moments – including Clem being a super-talented sculptor who left a trail of beautiful wood carvings wherever he went – that you’re just going to have to learn to live with, I’m afraid). It is in the history of June and the farm that most of the secrets lie. Privy to most of them is her partner Twig (Leah Purcell) and Candy Blue (Frankie Adams), who was taken in by the women as a baby.
Gradually Alice settles at the farm and once she has been surrounded by – cover your teeth again – the healing power of the Flowers for long enough, recovers her voice. She is protected over the years from the outside world, as they all are, by June, her shotgun and her willingness to let the ex-husbands who find the refuge beat her up so that she can report them to the police and have them locked up. It’s a risky strategy and requires the viewer to suspend some questions about the efficacy of Australia’s justice system, but it does allow an extra thread of questions about guilt, expiation and redemption to be wound around the increasingly complex figure of June.
About halfway through the series, we leap forward in time (in an otherwise exceptionally languorously paced endeavour) to Alice in her early 20s (now played by Alycia Debnam-Carey) getting her first job and her first proper boyfriend. This unleashes a whole new raft of questions, about whether we can ever really outrun our pasts, escape our traumas and break patterns imprinted on us before we can consciously reject them.
The twists and turns, though far more stately and measured than in an outright thriller, are plentiful enough to keep you hooked. What is missing, however, is any real sense of the characters involved, or their relationships to each other. What should be a closeknit sisterhood is instead a collection of individuals defined by and detached from each other by their secrets, guilt or other internal damage. The Flowers are ciphers, not flesh and blood women, which feels like an awful waste. Even the protagonists – June, both Alices, Twig and Sally – never feel fully formed, despite deeply committed and excellent performances.
There are also some plot points that are more noticeably glossed over than others. We learn that Twig’s children were taken from her by social services, for example, but nothing is made of the fact that she is an Indigenous woman and that this experience resonates with Australian history in a specific and terrible way.
The Lost Flowers feels like a careful arrangement tied with the right ribbon and delivered with the best intentions. But you might prefer a few living blooms instead.
• In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org.
