The Cement Garden

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Trailer—The Cement Garden

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I found this movie switching through channels and saw the whole thing,it´s a very interesting film,it portrays the life of a semi-rural and outsider family that starts to rot slowly,brother and sister love turns different from what everyone expects and when incest come by it´s taken the way it should,it´s a dark and sometimes funny film that talks about isolation and despair,it resembles to me to that movie "New Hemisphere Hotel" and "The Shining" see it and give your own comment. I´ll give it a good 10 on weird films.

"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

This is one of those movies that is disturbing because it seems like a scenario that could happen in real life, and probably does. I won't go into details because almost anything that I could write about this film would be a spoiler. Suffice to say, that a family of youngsters makes is forced to make a rash decision out of desperation and then deal with the consequences of their actions. The viewer is then forced confront moral issues that are both difficult and troubling in a complex way. Unlike, the standard Hollywood film - or even the standard English film for that matter, this film is about shades of grey instead of blacks and whites. It is filled with compassion and pathos. A real throwback to the kind of movie that marked the great English cinema of the mid 60's. You can almost see a young Tom Courtney starring in this film if it had been made 3 decades earlier. A wonderful film!

Simply a piece of art. More than this: a magnific, dark and lonely piece of art in the middle of a desert. The cement is hard and hide things that must to be hide. In this film the past time is erased, digged in the deep under 10 feets of cement. One of the characters says (in the final of the movie) - You are sick!-, but he don't know that the sick was himself. 10/10 - So far the best cinema Thanks for your art, Andrew Birkin

Having read McEwan's haunting and beautiful novel some years ago, I anticipated the film and recently found it in my university library. Sad to say I was hugely dissapointed. Birkin has taken away the novels macabre humour and charcterisations and replaced them with sign posts which direct us to the reasons why they have their affair (parental loss, burgeoning sexuality) rather than letting the feelings and jealousy fester as they did in the novel. Also he has altered Julie's older lover Derek to the point where the funniest scene in the book (Derek taking the bemused Jack to a pool hall) has been completely erased and the charcter is now foreign and middle class as opposed to working class and English. Having said that it contains the most hilarious line of dialogue I have ever heard: Jack (to Tom) when you look at William, do you get a funny feeling in your dinky?