THE GARDEN has the virtue of its simplicity, but is a typical student film, the sort that used to pop up at film festivals as filler. It has become TV filler, shown on PBS a couple of times in its Cinema 13 series.
Silent and in black & white, it limns the non-adventure of a little girl straying from her busy (on cell phone) mom to explore briefly an urban garden. An old lady bites into a piece of fruit, and later the little girl does likewise, only to be whisked away by her uppity mom.
Was this the fruit of knowledge from the Garden of Eden? Is our diminutive protagonist enlightened into the wickedness of the world by her willful act? We'll never know, because fledgling filmmaker Jason Stefaniak merely presents the setup, not the payoff.
Made for the NYC Tisch school, it merely displays a modicum of technical competence and nothing more, par for the course.
