The Hanging Garden

In his début The Hanging Garden, Fitzgerald, from the Canadian city of Halifax, made a coming-of-age film in which present and past come together in a beautifully photographed magic-fantastic form. It is a successful combination of very original, often surrealistic film art and a very emotional drama about the problems of a gay young man returning to his parents’ home in Nova Scotia for the first time.Sweet Williams returns home for the wedding of his husky sister Rosemary (a beautiful role by Australian actress Kerry Fox) to Fletcher, a friend of Sweet’s from his teenage years. Sweet is clearly ill at ease during the reunion with his tyrannical father and mother. The painful memories from his youth are reawoke when Sweet comes face to face with the spirit of the teenager he once was. In a long flashback, Sweet (15 and much too fat) is surprised by his senile grandmother when he is fiddling in the garden with Fletcher. His mother decides he needs healing and hires someone to initiate him into hetero love. In the present, problems are piling up too. Sweet is the only one who seems to have changed in the course of ten years and the attractive Fletcher is still interested in him.