Il giardino delle delizie

A young married couple, after the wedding, leaves for the honeymoon and stops in a hotel. Carla is three months pregnant and falls asleep very soon. Carlo thinks back to his past life all night long. He remembers his bitter and bad youth experiences, his reactions, his family, the religious institute and the moment he met Carla, the fights and so on. During the night he leaves the room and meets a woman who invites him in her room. Then he goes back to his wife, but she feels sick. He is a doctor, so he gives her a sedative and while she is going back to sleep he gets back to the other lady, but when he gets back to Carla he finds her dead from a haemorrhage.
Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala - English translation Francesca Sala

Il giardino delle delizie wanted to be a visit to the ghost of the past, not to exorcise them, but to confirm a lack of creativity: I had to get rid of my school, my family, the news and the culture that was forced on me (and by school I also mean what they taught me at the Experimental Centre). I wanted to make a “freakishly good” film, where the middle-class structure of the Catholic education, a matter I was really interested in, and the deep connection between Catholicism and bourgeois ideology, were shown through very nice pictures, to increase the overall sense of tragedy. I t was my first film which should have been sponsored by Italnoleggio, but the twenty million were finally given after a screening at the Vatican, who decided its fate and cuts. It was massacred by censorship. One of my misfortunes was that in the meantime that production supervisor named Doria became a producer. He quickly and voraciously took the power in his hands and I suddenly found this weird monster in my way. He became lethargic, without any organisational ability, possessed by the demon of power and scam. So not only I had to find myself the money for the film, the locations, but I also had to accept shooting in a studio, the one thing I hate, and with a scenic designer who during the day built what I had to change or do again at night, he didn’t even know that the only advantage of the studio are wild walls and he carefully nailed them to the ground! He was called Visone and he then specialised in cheap western films. My experience with Doria as a producer was bloodied. Then he did something even more serious, he showed the material, without asking me, to the Gallo-Micciché group of Pesaro and the material, which was actually very evocative also thanks to an amazing black and white photographer, Aldo Scavarda, made Gallo and Micciché ask vehemently to Doria to make me finish the film before Pesaro Film Festival. This only made me lose the directions of the film. I felt like a pregnant woman who is asked to get her baby out by the next day. I made a deal, but unfortunately a verbal one, to take apart and then put the film back together after Pesaro. Of course after what happened there I couldn’t even be close to that film. It was one hour and six minutes long, they cut almost thirty minutes of it and the critics, completely ignoring what happens in it, talked about an “interesting debut” but also of a “fragmented film”. There was a sort of bullfight between the critics and me, in Pesaro. In my naivety I thought that they were the last phase of the creativity of a movie, that they would discuss the interesting or less interesting parts but instead I had the feeling of being in front of a dogsled team and that I had to throw something in their mouths and the only thing I had was irony. And it was even worse when the audience, who at the time could vote for the best film, awarded mine instead of their choice, a terrible Cuban film called Manuela

Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala - English translation Francesca Sala

Regia, soggetto, sceneggiatura e montaggio: Silvano Agosti.
Director of photography: Aldo Scavarda.
Art director: Rosa Sala, Antonio Visone.
Costume designer: Gisella Longo.
Music: Ennio Morricone.
Cast and characters: Maurice Ronet (Carlo), Lea Massari (la donna bruna), Evelyn Stewart (Carla), Franco Beroni (Carlo bambino), Vanna De Rosas (una bambina).
Production company: Enzo Doria per la Doria G. Film.
Italian distribution: I.N.C.