The Garden Of Earthly Delights

A delightful vision
I really enjoyed this film, not only because of its unique presentation of the beautiful, eerie city of Venice, but also because of Lech Majewski's (he wrote, directed and filmed it) quite sensuous, mischievious, philosophical, and lovely treatment of love and death.

Its the story of a lovely, intelligent art historian and her lover, an engineer, who move to Venice in the last year of her life. She has a penchant for the artist Bosch, and the two of them meditate on, learn from, and attempt to physically re-create some of the important scenes from his famous and symbolically bizarre paintings.

The music (also created by Majewski) adds a poignant and dreamy touch; the hand-held camera work is later explicated by the director himself in the "Extras" on the disc.

To me, it was a very accessible 'art' film which never dragged, and, indeed, left me with a peaceful, almost nostalgic afterglow.

Kaleidoscope
As with another film I reviewed once upon a time, The Garden of Earthly Delights is also for acquired tastes.
How do you render palatable the brevity, mystery, uncertainty and yes, wonder of life and its discontents? A precarious task at best and not for everyone.
I would say this: if you'd prefer an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians over reading, let's say, Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I'm going to guess this may not be for you. But who knows?

This film skillfully uses a handheld camera which seems forever on uneven ground, a co-star who plays the boyfriend and is suppose to be doing most of the filming but seems more a distant observer in many of the scenes than a connected lover, and the city of Venice which is not only beautiful but symbolic of fluidity, the ever-changing landscape of life.
Juxtaposed within all this is a sensually tragic art historian played by Claudine Spiteri.

(The art museum, in contrast to the fluid world...

Excellent and unexpected
This film treated Venice as a never-still delightful background for a love and death story that will appeal to all art lovers. Few of this type of film are available and when we who love them find them we are over the moon. It leaves us thinking about the nature of life and love and art and how there is little fairness in any of it. Please do not watch it if you are looking for the regular film. We all need to learn the sense of play again from it.....

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