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