Garten der Zuflucht

Hard to tell whether somebody wanted to make a pretentious allegory and threw in a naked Melanie Griffith to help market it, or just wanted to market a naked Melanie Griffith and threw in a pretentious allegory as justification. In any case, my guess is there wasn't enough budget for more than a half-baked job; the movie doesn't seem to know where it's going or why.

I'm aware this may sound terribly superficial, but this film truly deserves to be watched and appreciated, first and foremost, for its mesmerizing portrayal of a stunningly beautiful Melanie Griffith.

Griffith appears nude in several scenes, with the camera offering intimate-though tasteful-glimpses of her body, particularly her breasts, which the film lingers on with quiet reverence.

She plays a mute girl, never speaking a single word, which adds to the allegorical quality of Ha-Gan. At its core, the film is a parable about the tension between tradition and modernity. Through sparse dialogue and evocative imagery, it explores a world in transition-one where timeless values and rigid customs are slowly being disrupted by new, unfamiliar forces.

The cinematography beautifully captures both the serenity and harshness of the landscape, echoing the emotional and cultural dissonance experienced by the characters. Sadly, the film is not (yet) available with its original Hebrew audio and English subtitles.

I'm not the best guy to review this perhaps because it was originally in Yiddish and the version I saw was dubbed into German with no English subtitles, so needless to say a lot of it was lost on me. It does hold your interest somewhat, but perhaps mostly because a nineteen-year-old Melanie Griffith is running around butt-naked through about half of it. I have no idea why Griffith's character is hanging around Israel nor why the young actress herself was there (Is she Jewish perhaps?). At the beginning of the movie, she's kind of a mute, errant schoolgirl. She nearly gets hit by a bus and gets chased into the countryside by a trio of sex-minded males. After wandering around the wilderness and nearly getting raped twice, she manages to lose all her clothes. And between that and her penchant for eating apples, she's obviously supposed to represent Eve in the Garden. Perhaps this is a metaphorical commentary on the other story which involves a son trying to get his father to sell his land to some shady developers. Perhaps the whole thing is about a kind of fall from paradise.

The natural scenery here is very impressive. It's easy to see why people have spent thousands of years fighting over this land. Melanie's natural scenery is also very impressive. This might actually be her best film, not so much because of the nudity (which is pretty typical of her 70's and early 80's work before she became a STAR), but because she doesn't talk. Like her mother (Tippi Hedren), Griffith was very easy on the eyes and very hard on the ears with her shrill little-girl voice. It's not that she's a bad actress really, but the less dialogue she delivers the better (too bad they didn't think having her character in "Working Girl" be mute).

I didn't really understand this movie enough to either recommend it or pan it, but it would be interesting to see it again with some subtitles.