Strange Gardens (2003)
The Age
Thursday August 30, 2007
FILM REVIEW: STRANGE GARDENS (2003)
SBS, Wednesday, 1pm One of the highlights of this year's Melbourne Film Festival was Conversations with My Gardener, essentially a two-hander between a bourgeois painter escaping Paris for the provinces and his working-class gardener. The men slowly come to realise that lying just under their very different surfaces are the most powerful of connections, waiting to be tapped. This is a favoured theme in the work of French director Jean Becker, son of the famous Jacques. Jean Becker rose to prominence with an edgy adaptation of a Sebastien Japrisot novel, One Deadly Summer (1983), starring Isabelle Adjani. But it was his Children of the Marshlands (1999; often on SBS) that confirmed his arrival as a filmmaking talent. It is a near-perfect story of a solitary man wandering the countryside at the end of World War I. He chances on a marshland hut and finds himself unavoidably in a relationship with a surly neighbour. Sweet and tender, it is as good as any film of recent times. Four years later, Becker made Strange Gardens. Two kindly but bubbling men, just past the early prime of life, are caught up in the war that encases them. When a woman they both desire makes an off-hand remark, their masculine and nationalist pride is stirred and they blow up a railway signal box. As payback, the occupying Germans promise to execute four hostages the next day if the men don't give themselves up. What can and should they do? Yet again, Becker adds to his reputation as one of the great chroniclers of living through and beyond the 20th century's two world wars. He delights in taking on sacred cows, using humour to challenge received opinions and push our expectations and emotions to breaking point. Strange Gardens was highly controversial in France, where there is no more taboo subject than the Resistance. Balancing perilously on the edge of sentimentality, into which it collapses with an overly explicit coda, the film is a salutary lesson about the dangers of judging others. One can never know the whole story behind somebody's behaviour. It may represent an act of love or homage more beautiful than most of us could imagine.
© 2007 The Age