A stroll through Quebec’s gardens
The Gardener (E, 88 mins) Directed by Sebastien Chabot Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★1⁄2
Sometimes, a film comes along that seems to be immune to reviewers. If you are a fan of the art of constructing and tending gardens – one of those people who come as close to God as it is possible to on Earth, while getting dirt under your nails and contemplating the changing of the seasons and how they write themselves upon the furrows in the soil just as incontrovertibly as they do within the furrows of your brow – then I have no doubt that anything I could say about The Gardener would be redundant. And that’s fine. Have at it.
The Gardener is a 2016 production, first released in 2018 and now – I can only guess that someone at the distribution company has just always wanted to see it on a big screen – rolling out in a selection of Aotearoa’s finest small cinemas, in the depths of winter.
The film takes us to Quebec and Les Quatre Vents, the famous garden that Francis Cabot – the eccentric and enormously wealthy hero of this story – created there.
The garden, of course, is a rhapsody of colour, variety, design and highlights Cabot’s undoubted genius and passion for sticking things in the ground and then watching them grow.
Sebastien Chabot – making his first and (so far) only film – takes us on a stroll through the grounds, introduces us to a few people who can wax eloquent about how marvellous it all is and probably believes, quite rightly, that is all anyone will ever ask of this film.
Learning, late in the film, that the garden is only open to the public for four days every year – and that it is usually locked away as the private domain of a few members of one of North America’s wealthiest families – was no real surprise. It seemed somehow inevitable.
The Gardener is now screening in select cinemas nationwide.