Horst in Translation ([email protected])
"Die Blume der Hausfrau", which means "The housewife's flower" is a German documentary from 1999, so this one will soon have its 20th anniversary already. It runs for roughly 1.5 hours, slightly over, and can be considered today the most known film by writer and director Dominik Wessely. It is a fairly early career effort from him and he is still shooting movies today. The name "Vorwerk" is pretty well-known here in Germany as it describes a company who is keen on sending their employees to their (potential) clients' apartments and have them convince the people to buy modern hoovers. Of course this process always includes a presentation where the employee cleans a dirty carpet or something like that. I guess I should not be saying "employee" because they actually are freelancers and that is just one of many things you will find out during the watch. I personally found it interesting how many Italian-Germans work for Vorwerk.Anyway, the way how you perceive these salesmen will be different for everybody and totally depends on your personal approach. Some call them even criminals, others say they are just normal businessmen and most people probably think it is something in-between. This probably includes myself too. I think while the subject may not interest everybody, it is good the film was made as it sheds light on a subject/profession whose only contact will it be to say they are not interested if they ever run into a Vorwerk salesman out in the real world and we see there are human beings behind the mask. We also find out, at the very end, that it really is a difficult profession and field and only very few have what it takes to be successful there. It's a constant battle between ruthlessness and reliability. I think this is definitely a film that should be seen more often and it went way too much under the radar. I give it a thumbs-up. Go check it out if you can. Admittedly, it really isn't easy to find this one at all.
