Cement Garden

Ian McEwan’s spare and unsettling first novel has become a remarkably sensitive and eerily beautiful film.  In a situation reminiscent of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, four recently orphaned children live in a house in the middle of nowhere and create their own alternative lifestyle, hoping that the authorities won’t find their mother’s concrete-buried corpse and split them up by taking them into care.  The youngest withdraw into their own private worlds of diary-scribbling and cross-dressing, while teenagers Jack and Julie begin a hesitant sexual relationship, driven by curiosity but hindered by immaturity.  Stanley Kubrick’s former assistant Andrew Birkin specialised in adapting complex novels: he also wrote the screenplays for The Name of the Rose and Perfume.  His only feature won Best Director at Berlin, and he added an incestuous frisson of his own by casting his son and niece (his sister Jane’s daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg) as two of the siblings.