`The Cement Garden': Familial Bonding That Finally Falls Apart

Movie review

XX 1/2 "The Cement Garden," with Andrew Robertson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alice Coultard, Ned Birkin, Sinead Cusack. Written and directed by Andrew Birkin. Varsity. No rating; includes nudity, incest and masturbation scenes. -----------------------------------------------------------------

A close-knit family is disrupted by the death of the last remaining parent. The surviving orphans, determined to stay together, unite to prevent adults from suspecting the truth. In the process they isolate themselves, becoming a self-ruling community.

This premise has spawned a mini-genre during the past quarter century. Jack Clayton's "Our Mother's House" (1967) did a superbly Gothic job with the story by adding a "Lord of the Flies" twist. William A. Graham's "Where the Lilies Bloom" (1974) Americanized and almost normalized it. In Jacques Fansten's whimsical French film, "Cross My Heart" (1990), there was only one orphan, but his classmates became his family, bonding with him by keeping the secret.

Artiest - and pokiest

"The Cement Garden" is a British adaptation of a 1978 first novel by Ian McEwan ("The Comfort of Strangers," "The Good Son") that introduced incest into the storyline. Adapted by Andrew Birkin ("Burning Secret"), it's the artiest and the kinkiest of the bunch. It's also the pokiest.

The movie opens in an isolated house in a squalid British neighborhood, the home of four children whose ages range from 7 to 18. First their father (Hanns Zischler) dies of a heart attack while working on his concrete back yard. Then mother (Sinead Cusack) succumbs to an unidentified disease and her body is hidden in the basement.

Fifteen-year-old Jack (Andrew Robertson) is a pimply, flaky kid whose chief preoccupations are masturbation and flashy science-fiction. He's also sexually attracted to his older sister, Julie (Charlotte Gainsbourg, the director's niece), who doesn't discourage his interest, though neither seems to know quite what to do or who should be the aggressor.

Their younger siblings, Sue (Alice Coultard) and Tom (Ned Birkin, the director's son), are mostly left to their own devices.

Even death becomes a joke

The best scenes tend to be luridly funny: the embarrassed Jack being coerced into singing "Greensleeves" on his birthday; an adolescent discussion of gender roles and cross-dressing; the teasing encounters between androgynous brother and equally androgynous sister. Even the father's death is turned into a joke through the juxtaposition of his backyard exertions and Jack's bathroom antics.

The movie effectively draws us into the world of these kids, but director Birkin doesn't always know what to do with them once he's established the territory that confines them. Before the parents die, they seem like individuals. Afterward, they're almost abstract creations, no longer tied to a single identity as they explore the freedom of being parentless and without adult supervision.

This may have been intentional, but dramatically it's a dead end. It takes an outsider to pull the story together, and his intrusion is so unlikely it throws the movie off-balance. Carefully acted and genuinely odd, "The Cement Garden" is a curiosity rather than a successful venture into unexplored territory.