Film

The Garden of Earthly Delights (2004)

Director: Lech Majewski

Movie review

From Time Out London

The cross media relationships within the prolific Majewski’s oeuvre continue apace as the director adapts his own novel ‘Metaphysics’ for this Venice/London-set drama of an aesthetically informed, but doomed, romance. Art Historian Claudia (Spiteri) is very ill and very consumed by her appreciation of Hieronymous Bosch. Chris (Nightingale) is studying gondola construction but spends most of his time filming Claudia as their relationship progresses towards its fatal closure. Filming in English, and with, one assumes, an eye on the audience that choice might reach, Majewski continues his exploration of major themes – big questions are asked about art and life, while bodies and minds, values and behaviours are undressed and examined – but the ceaseless camera/film within a film tests attention, limiting the range of enquiry and putting too much pressure on Spiteri as the agent, or avatar even, of the film’s abiding intelligence. In its international assembly, it seems, in the final analysis, to float free of the deeper geographical, cultural and historical roots that nurtured his earlier work.

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