Il giardino delle delizie

Another film from the collection of unjustly forgotten, but otherwise excellent artistic achievements. Doctor Carlo arrives with his young and beautiful new wife Carla at a hotel to spend their honeymoon. Instead of enjoying the most beautiful moments of their marriage, the couple's mutual strangeness becomes evident at first sight, and Carla becomes increasingly repulsive to Carlo. Why is that? The film answers that question in such a way that it earned censorship interventions from the Catholic Church (which is why the film is also so short) - it is not about the specific problem of one marriage, but about a much broader issue, encompassing the position of women and the bond between a man and a woman in European (Christian) culture as a whole. A woman, according to the Bible, is the object created from man, for man and for his pleasure, while also being a necessary partner for the pleasure of both body and spirit, the opposite in a necessary union. The source of frustration for the protagonist is the fact that man created woman in order to take her away again, to prohibit her as an object of (physical) pleasure, and to keep her only as an object of a necessary family bond (in which mainly spiritual values should be cultivated and physical contact should only happen when it is necessary, for the purpose of procreation). The instrument and ideological originator of this violation of human nature is of course, as so many times before, the church, which has accompanied Carla since childhood (like all Italians ...). It is a classic "art" affair in which the best aspect is the attention-forcing deliberately surprising and "illogical" sequencing of shots (the alternating main storyline, the flashbacks, and the imaginations). Each cut is thus a surprise. (27/07/2014)