The Garden of Torment (1976)

The Garden of Torment (Le jardin des supplices) is a 1976 French film based very loosely on Octave Mirbeau’s 1899 novel of the same name (the title of which is sometimes rendered in English as The Torture Garden). Mirbeau was one of the major writers of the Decadent Movement of the 1890s. Part of the novel is set in China. The movie takes China in the late 1920s as its setting. It’s an interesting choice. China was in chaos. This was still the warlord era but it was increasingly clear that the real struggle for power would be between the Communists and the Nationalists.

Dr Antoine Durrieu (Roger Van Hool) has been involved in a scandal involving the supplying of cocaine. His friend the Minister protects him from the worst consequences but it seems advisable for Durrieu to leave France for a while. He is sent to China to run a hospital. His predecessor in the job mysteriously disappeared.

On board the ship en route to China Durrieu gets a taste of the kind of decadence he will find among the European community in China. He has to treat a priest for a venereal disease. There’s a sex murder. There’s lots of sexual activity. There’s also an air of hopelessness.

Running the hospital is an exercise in futility. Drugs and anaesthetics are sent regularly but they never reach the hospital. They are held up in Customs. The Customs service is controlled by an Englishman named Greenhill (Tony Taffin). He diverts the drugs for his own purposes. They end up going to warlord armies. Greenhill seems to be involved in some very murky political activities.

Durrieu is also an avid collector of Chinese art, a passion he shares with Greenhill. But no-one in Canton can buy Chinese art objects without Greenhill’s permission.

Dr Durrieu is not a terribly moral person but he does take being a doctor seriously. He decides it is necessary to get to know this Mr Greenhill.

He does get to know him. He also gets to know Greenhill’s daughter Clara (Jacqueline Kerry). And her friend Annie, a Chinese girl obsessed with death and sex.

Antoine Durrieu is a rather conflicted man. He thought of himself as being a bit of a hedonist and a decadent who had no interest in traditional morality but the things he sees in China make him realise that he isn’t as cynical as he thought. He is shocked by the violence and cruelty that he sees, much of which is intimately connected with Greenhill and his daughter. His outlook is complicated by the fact that he falls in love with Clara although he is deeply shocked by her obsessions with sex, death and cruelty.

Antoine is even more shocked when he discovers the things that go on in the garden attached to Greenhill’s mansion - the torture garden of the book’s title.

The European community in China has been enjoying a life of outrageous luxury and self-indulgence but that may be coming to an end. There seems to be revolution in the wind. The smarter Europeans are getting out.

Antoine knows that getting out would be a sensible option, but he is obsessed by Clara and won’t go without her. And Clara doesn’t intend to go anywhere. Clara is more than a little in love with death.

Antoine is a bit of an innocent. He liked to have his fun with whores and we see him doing just that at the start of the film but we get the impression he treated them very decently, and even with affection. He finds himself drawn into a world of cruelty but he is a man who is incapable of cruelty.

There’s definitely a strong de Sade influence at work in this film (as there was in the novel). There’s also a political subtext but it’s worth pointing out that Mirbeau’s novel was political in the context of 1890s politics, and the political obsessions of 1926 were not those of 1899 (or of 1976 when the movie was made). Mirbeau was attacking capitalism while the movie is more concerned with colonialism. I’m not sure it would be correct to see this as an anti-colonialist film though. It’s about corruption and power and cruelty as integral parts of human nature (which perhaps makes it more Sadeian). In fact I don’t see any overt political content here. The movie makes it clear that if there’s a revolution that sweeps away the old order the new order will be just as bad. Political power always corrupts. It’s a profoundly pessimistic view.

1976 was the height of the European cinematic craze for mixing art and erotica, with some film putting more emphasis on the art and some emphasising the erotic. It was obviously Emmanuelle that kicked off the craze. Other notable films of this type include The Story of O, Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974).

Lionel Legros’s cinematography is impressive. On the whole it’s a visually lush film although quite shocking in places. And at times the costumes and hairstyles really are outrageously 1970s.

Christian Gion had mostly directed comedies and had never made anything remotely like this movie before. He thought it would be an interesting challenge and he does a fine job.

Nucleus Films have released this as a region-free Blu-Ray with extras including an extremely informative audio commentary by David Flint and an interview the film’s director. The transfer is excellent.

The Garden of Torment is erotic and it is arty, and it’s provocative and disturbing and convincingly decadent. Antoine Durrieu is passive but likeable figure, an observer of life rather than a participant. Clara Greenhill is a fascinatingly complex woman, both evil and weirdly sympathetic. Interesting stuff. Very highly recommended.