Article by Luca Delpiano
Translation by Giulia Zanotto
Presented in the feature film competition at the 43rd Torino Film Festival, Morgan Knibbe’s The Garden of Earthly Delights explores the connection between body, city and identity. In Manila’s Red Light District, two stories are intertwined: that of Ginto, a young boy who dreams of rising in the criminal world alongside the friend he is secretly in love with; and that of Michael, a Dutch tourist who arrives in the Philippines and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses, becoming a symbol of white privilege that continues to exert power over vulnerable bodies.
The film begins and ends with the image of Ginto running, fleeing, looking for another place that cannot be found. This frame creates a circular structure that breaks down the idea of temporal progression. Thus, Manila becomes a place without development or memory, where the characters wander in a state of suspension, torn between the future and the past. The city, set in an atemporal context, thus becomes the non-place par excellence. The sequence that alternates between Michael’s scene amid the delights of sex tourism and Ginto’s ecstasy at the entertainment offered by a shopping mall is illustrative. Manila, outside of time and space, becomes a mysterious and wild land exempt from laws and morals. This highlights the consequences of Western colonialism, which has transformed the city’s inhabitants into rigid commodities, objects of exploitation subservient to the desires of foreigners. In this sense, the discrepancy between locals and tourists is visually rendered in the moments in which Michael swims in his hotel’s infinity pool, while below him lies a maze of shacks.
From a symbolic perspective, the blossoming flowers that Ginto sees under the influence of drugs embody a desire for growth and maturity, which is destined to remain confined to a dreamlike space, unable to materialize in a reality marked by the specter of undecidability. The androgyny of some of the supporting characters, like that of Ginto himself, an effeminate man with a soft spot for women’s makeup, thus takes on a political connotation. These bodies, suspended between masculine and feminine, continuously reshaped according to the expectations of the tourist who observes (and purchases) them, become figures reflecting the same temporal undecidability in which they are forced to live. This is how The Garden of Earthly Delights invites the audience to redefine an entire system of gazes.
