Garden of Beauty (1975) Poster

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8/10
unexpected crosslight on a great author
garwy24 August 2001
guillaume apollinaire is probably the greatest of the surrealists and wrote france's most popular modern love poem.

when he wasn't being a heavy intellectual and pillar of the french academy he was writing some of the best pornography since the seventeenth century.

the original novel on which this film is based is packed with totally promiscuous sex, but differs from other 'erotic' novels by having characters with real lives, real ideas, real histories and real feelings about each other.

in fact the novel is real pornography, in a way that most pornography isn't. think real ale and real ice-cream to get the idea.

the film-maker has just dumped the novel to film (its not a work of great technical beauty) so you get lots of pretty girls (and guys, which is a nice change)romping around starkers looking like they're enjoying it most of the time, but quite capable of having a bad time also (again, as i said, this is real pornography).

if you're part of the mucky mac brigade you'll probably miss the point of this film (though you'll still find plenty to enjoy in it). if you're from the moral majority, it's not for you.

if on the other hand you've ever wondered why most pornography just isn't erotic (wooden characters, no plot and silicone, that's why) this film might nudge you towards realising what blue movies ought to be like.

the one thing that makes me sad whenever i watch this movie is that i've never seen another one like it (except maybe fotografando patrizia).

anybody reading this a film-maker?
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Might this be the adaptation that I have seen as a child?--Or is there another, newer?
Cristi_Ciopron17 August 2008
Warning: Spoilers
The first, I think, the first erotic movie I have seen, as a child. I was very positively impressed with it. As I remember, it was a rather soft erotica. It was, I seem to remember, made in a comic note, without the strong smells and scents of the Italian corrosive erotica. The main quality for me it was its explicitness and overt indiscretion; judging by the impression that several other erotica made on me at the same age (e.g., BASIC INSTINCT or GIULIA), this one must have been pretty poor . it was not, I now realize, a movie that I ever wished to see again.

I knew the lead male from a TV series. (Which leads me to believe that the flick I have seen was newer than this one.)
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