Cement Garden – 1993 | 105 mins | Drama | Colour

Plot Synopsis

The Cement Garden is a moody and dramatically disturbing drama of sibling incest and teenage alienation adapted from Ian McEwan’s 1978 first novel The Comfort of Strangers. French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg makes a sparkling English-speaking debut in the tough role of impish Julie, whilst Andrew Robertson is suitably convincing as her shy and awkward younger brother. Director Andrew Birkin is Gainsbourg’s uncle and his son Ned plays Charlotte’s youngest brother in the film. The film lacks the straightforward dramatics of Jack Clayton‘s 1967 Our Mother’s House, also Birkin’s central theme focuses more on the blurred areas between genders then the practicalities of their situation.

The film set during a sweltering summer in a bleak house amid a concrete London wasteland. When the family’s stern father (Hanns Zischler) dies of a heart attack whilst gardening, mother (Sinead Cusack) buckles under the strain of rearing her four children and becomes bedridden. When she, too, dies, the elder kids fear adoption and consequently bury her body in a cement box in the cellar.

School is over for the summer, so left to their own devices the children start to give liberated vent to their sexual confusion. The eldest, 16-year-old Julie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), becomes a surrogate mother to the family and toys with the incestuous fascination of her 15-year-old brother Jack (Andrew Robertson). Julie also begins dating thirtysomething property developer (Jochen Horst), but his increasingly intrusive curiosity threatens to expose their secret adolescent desire.