Young professor of letters leads to a tired and (un) comfortable routine between the forced cohabitation with his father, an elderly tailor long a widower, and the pitfalls of a mature and unsatisfied married woman. He lived with the dilapidated and neglected country home of his paternal grandfather, rediscovers the unexpected delights of a bucolic life in the care of a garden flourishing and abandoned, the legacy of the ancestor wise farmer and the enigmatic and enchanting presence of a young and mysterious girl. Small moral fable-toned light and sparse, the story of Sulik is a delightful fable ecologist who runs backwards along the path neglected and unknown of a return to nature, to its biological cycles and mystery, its remedies and its consolations, the alienating wisdom and magical alchemy of a rediscovery of self. The echo of a submissive and patient recall atavistic moves from the silent shadows of a garden dormant ancestral to the wishes of the young protagonist as the haunting song of a comely and remote siren that promises sensual reward for hidden treasures and immodest virtue. Ideally divided into 14 chapters (with a title and description) proposes the metaphor explicit diary and secret, the diegesis of a process that goes through the steps required for a journey of discovery and renewed awareness (from the comforts of an indolent life home town and enlightening the simplicity of rural life by the rhythms of time and seasons), where the meeting with the symbolic figures and goggled of mysterious wanderers (the saint who recalls Francis, the natural philosopher that recalls Rousseau and the rationalist conceptual recalling Wittgenstein) is the unexpected event of the fantastic, an unexpected materialization of unconscious desires that embody the prototypes examples of virtue 'philosophers'. Keeping the log lighter than a moral comedy film of the Slovak filmmaker manages to keep a safe distance the easy duplication of the symbolism of a cryptic language and convoluted as is the tired cliché of the grotesque typical of the western film to orient towards the rather rarefied elegy Soviet cinema (Tarkovskji, Konchalovskji) both in the choice of some visual solutions and color (the plane of the prologue sequence that opens the heavy foliage of an apple tree overflowing with fruits never caught, the use of a photograph saturated that enhances the varied polychrome Slovak autumn but especially the final sequence of levitation supine illuminating a lovely hag) that the use of a musical texture suspended between the mystery of the inevitable and that of a revelation. In almost vividly illustrative minimalism of the episodes you can see the thread of a deep feeling and arcane, mysterious sense of the time and nature through the things and people transforming them into the elements of a new cosmogony, the busty sensuality of the female body as a symbol of ancient the fertility of the earth, in the encryption of a mirrored language that you write and you read through the reflection of the signs of the real world, in the allusive complementary symmetry of destiny (the binomial mother-daughter and the father-son). Sulik signing his work original and fascinating at the bottom of the painting that appears at the beginning of the film (in the 'House of Jacob'): the icon of a cubist sore and tortured Saint Sebastian. Special Jury Prize at the 1995 'Karlovy Vary International Film Festival' and the 'International Festival of Young Cinema of Turin' and winner of five Czech Lions in 1996.
Review of The Garden
