Event

THE GARDEN THAT TILTS

Dir. Guy Gilles, 1974.
France, 80 min.

An underrated oddball from French director Guy Gilles, The Garden that Tilts is reminiscent of Rohmer at his most contemplative and painterly, except the action revolves around an ice-cold assassin (Patrick Jouané) who falls in love with his mark (Seyrig). Jeanne Moreau also co-stars (and sings!).

*****

When Delphine Seyrig's fairy godmother character nonchalantly descends in a helicopter upon the Medieval fairy tale realm of Jacques Demy's Donkey Skin, the surreal image is pretty indicative of Seyrig's regrettably short, enormously prolific (she appeared in over sixty films and only lived until age fifty-eight), and trenchantly unforgettable career. Seyrig had an innate ability to transcend every film in which she appeared, regardless of what auteur was directing.

She mostly famously worked with Chantal Akerman, Alain Resnais, and Luis Buñuel, but also Robert Frank, Francois Truffaut, and Harold Pinter. Among the first filmmakers to make use of video in France, Seyrig co-founded a radical, anarchistic collective of feminist filmmakers and directed two feature documentaries (Sois belle et this-toi and Maso et miso vont en bateau) and several shorts, including a wonderfully droll reading of the SCUM Manifesto with filmmaker Carole Rossoupoulos. Digging through Seyrig's filmography is an endlessly rewarding excavation of idiosyncratic gems, from queer vampire thrillers to pioneering camp adaptations of Virginia Woolf's Orlando.