The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Garden of Earthly Delights
| 24 October 2004 (USA)
The Garden of Earthly Delights Trailers

When a terminally-ill art historian meets an engineer, it is love and lust at first sight. But their love is threatened by her looming illness. With her remaining days on earth numbered, she chooses to fan the flames of her obsession by taking her lover on a trip to Venice, where the artist's work becomes the background for their physical passion and emotional discovery.

Reviews
AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks
ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.
Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.
Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.
leefaust An indie film to admire whether you're into every day Venice (like me), art (Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado of Madrid), an English art historian's comments on life as she dies from throat cancer, or a bit of skin (they are both very fit). This little indie film made in the ultra-realism style is extremely complex and moving but enjoyable. You can understand her trauma as a young woman faces death but wants to share everything she's learned and thought with the viewer and her lover. So she takes a romantic trip to the end enjoying every whim. Near the end she has a soliloquy on what has life become from thousands of years ago to modern life noting, "God has been replaced by entertainment".
richojr What an incredible waste of time. Claudia lived life to the end (albeit in the nude; a LOT of nudity). While her lover Chris began dying the day he heard the diagnosis. As a frequent world traveler, I thought that the scenes of Venice were well done. My wife is an art teacher, and she thought the attempts to bring the art world in general, and the work of Hieronymus Bosch interesting if incomplete. The triptych in question is housed in Madrid, and I somehow missed the journey from there to Italy. As the end nears, Chris's one redeeming act is to illustrate the chemical breakdown of the human body, to put things in perspective for Claudia. I thought the movie simply failed to meet expectations.