Caprice

caprice

17 min, 2022
Directed with Beatričė Bukantytė
- a BROOM Films and PINS AND NEEDLES production

Set in “Cafe Cleopatra” (notorious for its high quality absinthe and being open all night), Caprice is a gallery of fragile, self-obsessed characters unwilling or unable to connect. Over the course of a night, we see them trapped in reveries, gossip and people-watching, seeking the buzz of alcohol and the dance embrace. They are like cut flowers or pinned butterflies and they must pay for their capricious beauty with loneliness and a never-ending anxiety about their self-image. Our film offers hints of stories as it moves between moments which are sad, ridiculous, ultra-feminine, orchidaceous.

Caprice uses dialogues and themes from Ronald Firbank’s novels Vainglory (1915), Inclinations (1916), Valmouth (1919), The Flower Beneath The Foot (1923) and his play The Princess Zoubaroff (1920). A flamboyant modernist writer, Firbank is unique as a “master of high camp, a radical technician and radical homosexualiser of the novel” (Alan Hollinghurst) who constantly reworked themes of sexuality, religion and social anxiety.

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