The Garden

Derek Jarmon films are always interesting. People seem to love his work or despise it. "The Garden" takes the persecution that Christ faced and puts it in modern times, or an unknown time for that matter. We have two homosexual martyrs who are persecuted like Christ, by the church. Tilda Swinton plays a modern day Mary who's chased around by ruthless Paparazzis. The film contains many strange visual delights. There is not a whole lot of dialog except for poetic narration. Like Jodorowsky's "the Holy Mountain", it's chock full of bizarre religious images. The set pieces and Costumes are extremely avant-garde and colorful. If you enjoy films that are a trip for the mind, you'll enjoy "the Garden". I felt that Derek Jarmon was inventive with his camera tricks and imagery. If you like bizarre art-house films with hallucinatory imagery, you must see this film.

I can't really disagree with reviewers who dislike this film. It really isn't for everyone. It's kind of chaotic, and some things really don't work very well, and yet... there's something extraordinary about it: the combination of religious motifs and iconography, the elemental meditative character, the bleak Dungeness landscapes, the sense that the director is really engaging on some deep level with important things. The plot is vaguely connected to the Gospel narrative, and so everything has a symbolic connection to that, and has to be interpreted in relation to that. It all adds up to something extraordinary - yes weird and not altogether coherent, but still fabulous and haunting. A cinematic poem.

Watching this movie gave me the feeling that I had suddenly gone insane for 90 minutes. Now I can say that some parts were merely awful while others were pretentious crap. The only things going for this movie are the presences of Tilda Swinton even though she doesn't speak, and the two leading men who were at least cute. But those points are not nearly enough to rescue "The Garden" from itself. Be warned.

One gets the impression that other reviewers on IMDb have never seen or appreciated Jarman's other films, or any art film for that matter. This isn't for the intellectually inert. One also wonders whether they've taken the time to watch this one more than once -- its conflicted and dense, drawing on mutually contradictory sources for its symbolism, and attempting a synthesis or nexus.

The main themes are religion, love, oppression, family, and above all, time. Events and elements from every era of recorded human history co-exist together in one time and interact. While much of the film itself is done in the anxious, unsteady, rapid-moving style that Jarman came to be known for, other parts are filmed with graceful panoramic transitions. Throughout all the film, landscapes are replaced with artificial projections, perhaps to give the film an aura of unreality or allegory. It is at once both scripture and pornography, philosophy and nonsense, a gloomy warning and a hopeful swansong. I believe it to be one of Jarman's most un-acknowledged films. Don't let the harsh words of bad reviewers sway you against spending an evening absorbing this film -- its mesmerizing.

This is one of Derek Jarman´s best films. I have followed Derek Jarman´s career as a film maker and the only thing I want to say is that "THE GARDEN" is one of my favourite films.