Recensioni de* critic*

Gainsbourg and Coulthard (as sister Sue) give fine performances, the former balanced between bossy provocation and vulnerability; and Birkin keeps it all in line by avoiding sensationalism and showing a tender understanding of youthful confusion. An unusually sensitive and, dare one say, cinematic Brit Lit adaptation.

The Cement Garden is simultaneously sensual and voluptuously repellent—it takes an unusual and thoughtful look at decaying family relationships, to be sure, but the incest angle isn't any less creepy because it's consensual. As well done as it is, as exploratory as it tries to be, it ultimately has the emotional impact of a Party of Five episode in which all the orphans start screwing.

Set against a desolate London landscape of bomb sites and stark concrete shells, it deals with the equally stark topic of incest with delicacy and poetic elegance, always aware of where its boundaries lie.

The Cement Garden is no more concerned with instruction than with titillation. It is fiction, and remarkable fiction at that.

The Cement Garden is hardly for everyone (the heavy twin themes of sibling incest and death are right up front), but it's a gorgeous mood piece, rife with tension and promise in a surreal manner you rarely get to see.

Carefully acted and genuinely odd, "The Cement Garden" is a curiosity rather than a successful venture into unexplored territory.

In an Ian McEwan story nothing is quite as it seems, and many of the characters have a perfectly amoral willingness to break society's rules. That is the case here. "The Cement Garden" is not a pleasant film, nor is their any reassurance at the end - no promise that all will eventually be well. It's more of a seduction, like the events of the plot. It leads us into a world where some secrets are hidden and others indulged, and there is no restraint on its dark impulses.

Birkin at least has the good sense to let this material play itself out without winking at the audience. He understands the demented complacency at the heart of McEwan’s particular madness. A few of the performances, notably from Cusack and Gainsbourg (whose French accent, amazingly, is nowhere to be heard), are inspired.

It's hard to imagine that a film about burying your mum in the basement and sleeping with your sister could turn out to be as flat as "The Cement Garden." Andrew Birkin's version of Ian McEwan's dark coming-of-age novel treats its subject with such earnest matter-of-factness that the most unsettling elements turn dull.

The four young actors, by whom it stands or falls, deliver impressively, in particular Robertson and Gainsbourg, wholly convincing in her first English-speaking role.

“The Cement Garden,” a quirky drama of sibling incest and teenage alienation from British writer Ian McEwan’s 1978 novel. But this moody, dramatically uneven pic will need careful handling and good reviews to go wider than specialized playoff , and its unblinking portrait of teen and sub-teen sexuality could limit tube sales.