Cement Garden

The Cement Garden Andrew Birkin's film has it all: intense characters, controversial situations and unusual concepts, which shouldn't come as a surprise if we keep in mind that it's based upon a novel by Ian McEwan. The protagonists are Jack, a 16 year-old boy and Julie, his sister, barely a couple of years older; then come the youngest sister and the youngest brother. The four of them live with their parents, in a somehow bleak house, completely isolated from other neighborhoods.

Jack spends most of his time avoiding his home duties, such as cleaning up his room, and instead devotes most of his hours in a secluded spot in which he hides a worn out adult magazine and toilet paper. His mother actually confronts him and tells him, following the pseudo-scientific approach from Victorian age (which Foucault so aptly analyzed in his History of sexuality), that his moodiness and messiness is a direct result of self-abuse, and that should he continue practicing that he would end up extenuating his body.

One afternoon, the father is pouring cement into the garden and asks Jack for help, but while the father keeps working on the garden, the young boy is in the bathroom masturbating enthusiastically, with precise visual transitions, the director manages to apprise the moment of Jack's orgasm with the last breadth of the father, as he succumbs to a heart attack. Later on, Jack will tell to his sister "Besides... not my fault he died", answering a question that no sibling had dared to ask up to that moment.

The absence of the father marks the downfall of the family. The mother is unable to step out of her room, depressed as she is, and order and discipline soon turns into chaos and disarray. It's in this context that the constant taunting between Jack and Julie turns into something else. What at first begins as innocent flirtations soon brings up more tantalizing repartees. In one occasion, while Jack is on top of Julie, tickling her, she starts grabbing him in a very distinct manner and comes to an orgasm.

As the mother falls deeper into depression and illness, the fear of being discovered is diluted and thus the incestuous fantasy acquires a firm grasp on reality. As Lacan analyzed in his Antigone seminar, the death drive moves the Greek heroine towards the desire invested exclusively around the body of her deceased brother. In "The Cement Garden", the protagonists start cajoling themselves around this death drive that disappears and leaves only a very real desire and a very real erotic drive. "My brother is what he is" would say Antigone, and in a similar way Jack will tell her sister that if people love him then they will take him as he is.

In Ancient Greece the term "autadelphos" (autos: "same"; adelphos: "sisterly," related to delphus: "womb") would mean something irreplaceable. As Antigone says in Sophocles' play, if she would lose her children she could always get pregnant again, if she would lose her husband she could always find another man, but if she loses her brother, who could possibly replace him? They are, after all, creatures that have shared the same womb and nothing can compare to that. In a similar fashion, the passion between Jack and Julie defies all social norms and regulations. They are irreplaceable for each other, and as the house starts falling apart, they start getting closer and closer.

The absence of the father also means the absence of the nom de pere, the ultimate authority that inscribes the subject into society, that commands his offspring to occupy the male or female position in the symbolic order. Without this authority, male and female positions are interchangeable whether ideologically or practically, as it's made evident by the authority invested upon Julie, who has the full responsibility of being in charge of the house (a role that would be traditionally ascribed to a male), or by the youngest brother's obsession in wearing wigs and skirts, not only dressing up as a girl but also sleeping on the bed with another boy his age, pretending to be Julie and Jack. When Jack intends to stop this peculiar practices, Julie has but one answer for him: "You think that being a girl is degrading but secretly you'd love to know what is it like, wouldn't you?", and in a very tantalizing way places a most effeminate ribbon on his brother's neck.

Crossing all boundaries, subverting the heterosexual normative and assuming incest as something that feels natural and real, Birkin's film announces from the very beginning a dreadful end; perhaps it would be interesting to compare the novel's ending with the one in the film, because after all, once all is said and done, as Lacan would phrase it "…is important to note that one only has to make a conceptual shift and move the night spent with the lady from the category of pleasure to that of jouissance, given that jouissance implies precisely the acceptance of death — and there's no need of sublimation — for the example to be ruined".

The premise of offspring who try to hold their family together after parents' death or desertion has been done a number of times, most notably in "Our Mother's House" (1967), a little-known masterpiece directed by John Clayton. Here the emphasis is different though, concentrating on the developing intimacy between the oldest sibling Julie and her brother Jack. This is presented in a matter-of-fact and non-judgmental fashion, seeming to fit "naturally," as Jack in fact says, with their increasingly weird circumstances. Be warned: there is much adolescent nudity here, including a wild transcendental dance-in-the-rain performed very well by Andrew Robertson. BTW, that scene is reproduced almost identically in "Edges of the Lord" (2001), but with a much younger boy. Ned Birkin, whom I suspect of being director Andrew Birkin's close kin (an irony unintended I'm sure) plays the cross-dressing younger brother, and his sub-plot is not developed, which is probably just as well since he exhibits little talent. I suppose this is included to emphasize the point that in a family untrammeled by conventional moralities, each individual is accepted with whatever modus operandi "works" for him or her. Not an altogether bad idea when one considers it

"The Cement Garden", based upon a novella by Ian McEwan, deals with a similar theme to that of William Golding's "Lord of the Flies", namely the behaviour of children and adolescents when free of the constraints of adult behaviour. Four siblings from a working-class family - Jack, his older sister Julie, younger sister Sue and the youngest, Tom- are orphaned by the death of their mother, their father having died earlier. In order to stay together and avoid being put into the care of the local authority, they conceal their mother's death by hiding her body in a trunk, filling it with cement and leaving it in the cellar of their house.

The story takes place during a hot summer in a bleak, impoverished district of an unnamed British inner city. The children's house, a grim Modernist building, is one of the few remaining in an area marked out for redevelopment, and is surrounded either by soulless tower blocks or by derelict, rubble-strewn wasteland. Their father dies while trying to lay concrete over the garden, one of the few islands of green in the area, hence the title.

The book was published in 1978 and in many ways reflects the mood of Britain in the late seventies, a time of economic recession, of industrial unrest, of unemployment, of concern about declining public services and the condition of the inner cities. (The period also saw some of the hottest summers of recent decades). The book was also highly controversial because of the incestuous relationship which develops between Jack and Julie, something which possibly explains why it had to wait until 1993 to be adapted for the screen. Although the seventies were a period of increasing permissiveness in Britain, there was a limit to what the British Board of Film Censors would permit, and incest still seemed to be off-limits. This relationship, however, is an important part of the story; it can be seen as both the ultimate expression of family solidarity and as a conscious rejection of the taboos and conventions of the adult world, so an adaptation which omitted this relationship would not have worked.

Another controversial theme of both book and film is what might be called the confusion of gender identity. Tom, who loves to dress as a girl, is presented as a budding transvestite, and both Charlotte Gainsbourg and Andrew Robertson are here made to look remarkably androgynous; her hair is short and his long. Although their characters are named Julie and Jack, they could just as easily be Julian and Jackie.

The film was directed by Andrew Birkin, the brother of Jane and therefore Gainsbourg's uncle. (Another family member, Birkin's son Ned, was cast as Tom). Birkin is better known as a screenwriter than as a director, and this is one of only two feature films he has directed. Nevertheless, it is an accomplished piece of work, and the director is able to elicit some excellent performances from his young cast. McEwan's book, despite its desolate urban setting, is not a work of social realism. It can be seen as a modern development of the "Gothic" tradition, abandoning the supernatural elements and exotic settings beloved of Georgian and Victorian Gothic authors, but retaining their fascination with death, decay and the macabre and their emphasis on the darker side of human nature. It is a highly atmospheric piece of writing, and Birkin succeeds well in capturing its eerie, hallucinatory quality; not so much a midsummer night's dream as a midsummer nightmare. This is a film about British working-class life which stands outside the mainstream "kitchen sink" tradition. 8/10

Disarmingly strange film about a family of children fending for themselves after first their father, then their mother dies. Oldest son Jack eschews responsibility, leaving next oldest Julie to handle the everyday chores. In the midst of all these devestating changes, Jack and Julie begin to develop a singularly unusual bond, one that is threatened when Julie invites the outside world into their private domain by dating an older man.

This film sparks comparisons to the similarly themed OUR MOTHER'S HOUSE, but the two films differ dramatically. While the children in OUR MOTHER'S HOUSE construct an elaborate fantasy world for themselves(based in part on the dead mother's fanatic religious beliefs), there's no such pretentious in THE CEMENT GARDEN. The children live in a cinder block house, with a cement garden out back, on a plot surrounded by a flat, desolate looking landscape. There are several scenes where the children sit around saying nothing, doing nothing, something that never happens in the other film's active household. The costumes and household furnishings are nondescript; you can't figure out if this film is set in the sixties or the nineties. The overall feel is one of banality, lethargy, and a total absence of passion or vitality. Perhaps it's only in a situation like this that the relationship Jack and Julie have can flourish, and Jack can transform from a petulant, self-absorbed boy to a responsible, loving young man. Strange atmosphere, but very rewarding.

It's a real pity that 'Name Of The Rose' scriptwriter Andrew Birkin hasn't directed anything since 'The Cement Garden' if this puzzling and disturbing movie is any indication of his talent. Birkin also wrote this superb adaptation of Ian McEwan's perverse and haunting novel. A hypnotic study of a family of children left to fend for themselves, while wrestling with their forbidden desires and obsessions, it crosses over into almost Ballardian territory. The casting of Andrew Robertson and Charlotte Gainsbourg as the androgynous older siblings is the main reason why this odd movie is so successful. To add to the incestuous overtones, Gainsbourg is Birkin's niece, and first gained notoriety duetting with her legendary father Serge on a pop ditty titled "Lemon Incest" while barely in her teens. The layers continue by Birkin casting his own son Ned as the younger cross-dressing brother. This is a very strange and beautiful movie. Highly recommended.