THE HANGING GARDEN

**

Cast: Chris Leavins, Troy Veinotte, Kerry Fox

Director:Thom Fitzgerald

Rating: M

Reviewer: Peter Calder

A gay man returns to his provincial roots in Nova Scotia to lay the ghosts of his past to rest in this first feature by an acclaimed Canadian director of short films.

It's a familiar scenario and in the hands of a capable cast it is adeptly handled, but the changes of tone and narrative viewpoint are so wild and unpredictable that we're often at a loss about how we're expected to take it.

The film's main character, Sweet William (Leavins), comes home for the first time in 10 years, a once-obese teenager now gym-trim and self-confident. He arrives in the middle of the wedding of his older sister, Rosemary (our own Kerry Fox is a deliciously dissolute and foulmouthed bride), but he soon begins having visions of his teenage self (Veinotte's performance as the teenage William is infused with a dogged dignity).

Gradually the layers of a dysfunctional family are peeled back and William's youth, in which he was brutalised by a drunken father, is revealed. And William meets a tomboyish teenager who is introduced as his younger sister but who is not what she seems to be.

The acting is always adequate and often superb but the lines between farce and melodrama are too blurred to encourage an unambiguous response and it's all relentlessly downbeat. It's a showreel, perhaps, of Fitzgerald's emerging talent and reason to hope that there will be better to come.