Don, the main character of [Broken Flower], had two things he loved. Computers and women. However, as a late-middle-aged man who made money through computers, his passion for both has long since disappeared. There is no computer at home and his girlfriend Sherry has left. All he does is sit on the sofa and watch television or visit his neighbor, Cousin Winston.
The day Sherry leaves, she receives an anonymous letter written in red letters on pink paper. The person who wrote the anonymous letter gave birth to a son and raised him alone after breaking up with Don, and it seems that the 19-year-old is now looking for his father.
Money is horrified, but I can’t imagine any active response. The one who encourages him is his neighbor Winston, a self-proclaimed amateur detective. Winston finds the current addresses of four people on Don’s list of suspects, gives them to Don, and tells him to meet them. And so begins Don’s journey to find his old girlfriends.
This movie seems like a mystery story with a comical tone. There is no crime, but there is mystery, suspects, clues, and detectives. The way they are handled is also very genre-specific.
The reason this film maintains a fairly dark comedy is because the essential elements of a traditional mystery story are lost. Passion and motivation, meaning and direction. Don has no intention of solving this mystery. What dominates him throughout the film is his desire to go back and lie down on the sofa, the only thing he truly loves.
Because of this, the plot of this film becomes a series of disjointed jokes without a unified order or clear meaning. The world of [Broken Flower] is a slow chaos that is difficult to understand, difficult to predict, and even gives no clues to properly reflect on the past through the individual abilities of one person in that world.