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The Garden Movie Review

The Garden (Zahrada) is a 1995 Slovak drama film directed by Martin Sulik and starring Roman Luknar. It’s a very episodic, but interesting experiment.

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“You’re stuck here, just doing nothing“

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Jakub’s life arrives at a dead-end. He leaves his job, and gets into conflict with his father. The trouble just grows by his relationship with a married woman. Breaking out, Jakub realizes the pleasures of the countryside in the old garden of his grandfather. He finds true love with an angel, and encounters various exciting moments of his new free life.

If that sounds weird, it’s because it clearly is. This is a very poetic movie that is all about the intimate details and small pleasures one can encounter in life, both realistic and very much magical. The second half of the movie represents magical realism, and although solid, I personally preferred the grounded in reality scenes this time around.

The protagonist was so relatable to me personally, especially in his failure to leave home and find a good job. The father-son relationship is very well depicted, and all of the other characters are quite interesting, both the fantastical and the non-fantastical ones. Jakub has some genuinely moving as well as amusing moments with some of them, but he remains the heart of the film. Roman Luknar performed him so well and he has a great star quality and looks to him, essential for such a larger-than-life role.

The Garden is wonderful in its imagery, very charming and very artistic. Some of the imagery is quite arresting and the film succeeds as this poetic piece that is bound to charm everybody watching it. However, there is no denying the messy structure at place here.

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Yes, the pacing is problematic, the movie is incredibly episodic and the direction is also far from impressive. It acts as a series of vignettes that are mostly excellent, but as a whole, it lacks the connecting thread, especially thematically. It’s a work of art for sure, but intellectually speaking, it wasn’t satisfactory enough for me, though some of the dialogue here was very sophisticated admittedly.