This film was recommended to me and it was "Film of the Week" in the local TV guide. I saw the user rating of 7.0 and favourable user comments on IMDb. All in all, I was expecting something pretty interesting.
I was very disappointed, right from the opening scene. With a title like "Strange Gardens" I expected a dreamy, semi-mystical atmosphere and pace; but what I got was a rather lame bit of slapstick comedy. For almost an hour I kept waiting for the film to snap itself together, but it never happened. The comical tone persisted even through the blowing up of the railway signal box and the fatal injuring of the innocent French railway employee. There were only three sequences that were handled seriously: the shooting of the humane German guard, the railwayman's wife's "exposure" of her husband, and the execution of the injured railwayman. At the end, when the troubled son has been told the story about his father, his conversion from rebellious ingrate to devoted son is ridiculously sudden and complete, and it also doesn't make sense. Apparently he's supposed to realise that his father is not just an ineffectual buffoon, but a man of bravery and substance; that is supposed to emerge from his father's heroics in the Resistance. But what heroics? For 6 years prior to the Allied invasion on D-Day, the father has done precisely nothing to resist the occupying Germans. Then, when he and his mate and their girlfriend hear that the Allies have landed, they decide to sabotage the railway, without any real idea of how to do it. They manage to pull it off, thanks to an incompetent German guard and a lot of luck, but they fatally injure an old and innocent French railwayman in the process, having forgotten about him. Then they are rounded up as hostages with two others, all four having been chosen at random. They will be shot unless someone confesses to the crime. Do they confess and save their innocent comrades? No. The railwayman, knowing he is going to die anyway, falsely confesses and saves their skin.
So where's the heroism? If I had been the man's son and heard that story, I think I would have regarded it as confirmation that my father was every bit the idiot I had always thought him.
Quite a lot could have been made of that basic plot. Jean Becker, unfortunately, made little or nothing of it.
I was very disappointed, right from the opening scene. With a title like "Strange Gardens" I expected a dreamy, semi-mystical atmosphere and pace; but what I got was a rather lame bit of slapstick comedy. For almost an hour I kept waiting for the film to snap itself together, but it never happened. The comical tone persisted even through the blowing up of the railway signal box and the fatal injuring of the innocent French railway employee. There were only three sequences that were handled seriously: the shooting of the humane German guard, the railwayman's wife's "exposure" of her husband, and the execution of the injured railwayman. At the end, when the troubled son has been told the story about his father, his conversion from rebellious ingrate to devoted son is ridiculously sudden and complete, and it also doesn't make sense. Apparently he's supposed to realise that his father is not just an ineffectual buffoon, but a man of bravery and substance; that is supposed to emerge from his father's heroics in the Resistance. But what heroics? For 6 years prior to the Allied invasion on D-Day, the father has done precisely nothing to resist the occupying Germans. Then, when he and his mate and their girlfriend hear that the Allies have landed, they decide to sabotage the railway, without any real idea of how to do it. They manage to pull it off, thanks to an incompetent German guard and a lot of luck, but they fatally injure an old and innocent French railwayman in the process, having forgotten about him. Then they are rounded up as hostages with two others, all four having been chosen at random. They will be shot unless someone confesses to the crime. Do they confess and save their innocent comrades? No. The railwayman, knowing he is going to die anyway, falsely confesses and saves their skin.
So where's the heroism? If I had been the man's son and heard that story, I think I would have regarded it as confirmation that my father was every bit the idiot I had always thought him.
Quite a lot could have been made of that basic plot. Jean Becker, unfortunately, made little or nothing of it.