El jardín de las delicias

A fascinating mixture of fantasy, reality, sadism and tragedy. The main character, Antonio, is confined to a wheelchair, and is generally unresponsive to the world around him. His family is bent on shocking him back to reality by re-enacting various scenes from his life. It's often unclear what their real motives are. Antonio's story unfolds slowly, and each new revelation leaves you with more questions. The mix of the family's play acting, with Antonio's memories and fantasies gives the film a surrealistic air. Definitely not a up-beat film, but well worth watching.

Carlos Saura's "Garden of Delights" is a sly, black comedy about personal and political repression under Franco's regime. Psychodramas and shock therapy are among the tools of the trade employed to jump-start the memory of a wealthy industrialist recovering from an auto accident but still confined to a wheelchair. That his loved ones are in fact the instigators of such crude and farcical attempts to pry open the amnesiac's Swiss bank account should come as no surprise to anyone remotely familiar with Spanish history and culture. But Saura's dark tale, it seems, may proved too daunting to audiences who are unwilling to give themselves over to the film's dreamy, ruminative style that deliberately shunned "objective reality" for a subjective and interpretative approach to cinema. In Saura's view cinematic "reality" should represent the repressed state of the nation's collective consciousness and its refusal to surrender its dreams under those conditions. The debilitating conditions of fascism should not inhibit other forms of realities to exist or to challenge the prevailing political reality so that what "is" is not necessarily more important than what "should" or could have been. Scenes, real or imagined, accordingly compete for our attention throughout the narrative much as if the delights of the garden only become apparent after careful introspection and reflection. If fascism is indeed the soul of the new machine, then paralysis is just a state of the mind.

One of the films that Saura made at the beginning of the 70s with evident intellectual airs, artistic will, allegorical content and important political background. These first films by Saura have an undeniable historical importance, being among the first in which the ghosts of the civil war, buried in the 50s after so many films to the greater glory of the national side and the figure of the generalissimo, were resurrected. If the commercial cinema of the 1960s had been decidedly evasive and tried to bury any reference to the past and thus show a desired but false ideological unity in the country, the most critical authors of the regime had to settle for more or less veiled attacks to contemporary reality, but without the slightest allusion to the painful past and the still open wounds.

But with the 1970s, a radical change took place in Spanish cinema, with results as exceptional as Erice's cinema, or as often pedantic as in so many of these Saura films, and almost always with the production of Elías Querejeta, fundamental in this modernization of Spanish cinema.

Now it was also a matter of demonstrating that one was aware of the most advanced, sophisticated and demanding artistic currents of European cinema of the time, but without losing the local touch and focusing on the concerns of the left under Franco's regime; and of course taking advantage of the political context to be able to justify so much affectation when dealing with socially committed and politically militant cinema against the dictatorship.

Many of these films, not necessarily the best ones, became indispensable in film libraries and garnered awards at important European festivals, within a situation that was favorable to them.

Nobody was more belligerent than Saura with some of these films like The Garden of Delights and especially Cousin Angelica.

We must value the visual beauty of these films, which take advantage of Luis Cuadrado's always magnificent photography. It is a cinema that is always interesting, with deliberate planning, formal concerns and clear artistic ambition.

But seen with the perspective of the years and the once the intellectual fury of the time faded, The Garden of Delights seems to be a crude allegory, where the symbol is thrown in the face of the viewer, often without being successfully embodied in a story.

Characteristic is the insistent lack of subtlety in warning us of the allegorical reading of what we see, right from the first scenes with that "You don't understand anything. The important thing is the symbols" that the grandfather shouts. The same lack of subtlety that led the falangist husband in La prima Angélica to have his arm raised in plaster.

Thus, the treatment of the argument often abandons coherence, and takes all the licenses that Saura wants, because the important thing, he has already told us, is the symbol.

At the head of an interesting cast, José Luis López Vázquez, recovered from the commercial comedy of the 1960s, demonstrated during the 1970s his much greater range and interpretive quality. Here he struggles with a difficult role, a poisoned gift, where Saura's lack of interest in developing the story realistically and not allegorically puts him in a compromised position. Like the injured industrialist who is abused by his family with the sole intention of recovering the savings deposited in Switzerland, we do not know very well if he is amnesiac, traumatized, idiotized, or regressed to an infantile state. Its evolution throughout the film is also not convincing, but this again is due to a script that is in no way concerned with the story working on this realistic or functional plane, beyond the mere excuse to disguise the allegorical content. .

Saura seems continually busy feeding critics and analysts from intellectual circles, won over from the start by the film's progressive political positioning, and he shows courage in presenting a speech that could not help but make the authorities uncomfortable.

In short, a film of great historical importance, but that squeaks and annoys the viewer. Its allegorical content inevitably loses virulence and interest once its historical conjuncture has passed. On the other hand, interest in the symbol is difficult to maintain during its almost ninety minutes, and after an hour it gives us a feeling of a certain exhaustion. But I don't think Saura was worried about that, after all his movie wasn't there to entertain the masses...

This film was very dull and uninvolving. Perhaps it is a political allegory, for which I have no interest or understanding. Someone called it a comedy, but I didn't laugh once, nor did I noticed any attempts at humor. Most of the time I didn't know why the characters were saying what they were, if they were lying, who knew what... it was all very unresolved. Who were the man's advisaries? Who were his enemies, why?

At one point the father keeps asking "what's the Swiss bank account number?" Okay, so that shows he's greedy, but it isn't very clever or interesting or dramatic. Everybody in this film is greedy, which ruins the drama.

I really liked this movie. Despite the dull pace. Despite the contemptable characters. Despite the goofy surrealism. Despite the wonky music score. Despite the director's self-indulgence.

In juxtaposition, there are elements of this film that I did not like. Despite the master performance by Mr. Vazquez. Despite the interesting concept. Despite the nifty camera work.

For those who enjoy cerebral film devoid of entertainment, this one's for you. But please, do us all a favor if someone new to subtitled films invites a suggestion of what to watch, don't point them in the direction of this film.

There's a brief reference to Stevens' classic starring Taylor, Clift, and Winters.

Worth one viewing for die hard cinema junkies.