Good start, but then it gets ruined

A Disappointing Continuation

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I'm afraid a lot in America won't get the significance of The Serpent's Kiss as far as the gardens were concerned. At the point of time that this film is depicting 1699 in the reign of William I in Great Britain, the rich nobility even the nouveau rich that Peter Postlethwaite is portraying had this passion for ornate gardens. It was a style trend among those who could afford it. King Louis XIV in France designed the best for Versailles and everyone tried to copy him. So Postlethwaite who is a munitions manufacturer by trade and rich because of it has to have the most ornate garden in the kingdom so he can proclaim his status to the world.Enter Ewan MacGregor who plays a Dutch designer of gardens, he even worked for William of Orange. He goes to work for Postelthwaite and his wife Greta Sacchi to do his own version of Versailles and he's encouraged in this by Sacchi's cousin Richard Grant who has more than a passing interest in this project. It's his hope to bankrupt Postelthwaite and in turn win Sacchi for himself. Grant got something on MacGregor and he forces MacGregor to help him in his designs.Without the ornate status symbol garden Postelthwaite may still go bankrupt as he has an ill daughter in Carmen Chaplin and he's paying some heavy duty bills to quack doctors for her care.Some really fine mansion gardens in the UK that are great tourist attractions still serve as the backdrop of a most aesthetically pleasing film. Things don't quite work out for the plotter Grant and the people he uses and the ones he plots against. But that you see the film for.If you understand the concept that in 1699 those ornate gardens were a status symbol than The Serpent's Kiss will make sense to you.

This story is about a young, Dutch landscaper, Meneer Chrome (Ewan McGregor), who plans to create an extravagant garden for Thomas Smithers and his wife (Pete Postlethwaite and Greta Scacchi). His real plan or the real motive of this garden is to bankrupt Smithers so the not-so nice Fitzmaurice (Richard E. Grant) can seduce Smithers's wife. But Chrome begins having second thoughts about completing the plan after he becomes fascinated by Smithers's daughter Thea (Carmen Chaplin). I think people who have criticized this movie are far too harsh. I found it to have an excellent story with a talented cast. The performance that I felt most touched by was Carmen Chaplin's. Her struggle to find disorder in a world that wants to have order is an interesting element to the story. What I didn't like was the movie's pacing. I felt the message the movie was conveying that you can not control nature. I think this theme would have been better expressed in a short story or a short movie, not a feature length film. A part from that, I can sit through the hour and fifty minutes and feel glad that I saw this movie.

The story being a wee bit weak is more than carried by the class actors. Greta Scacchi is just magnificent and you can literally FEEL the tension when she lusts for McGregor in the greenhouse-scene. Not at all as bad as some would make it out to be. Nice period piece shot in beautiful surroundings.

What seems really incredible in that movie is that the talented Philippe Rousselot chose its screenplay to shoot his first movie as director. From the beginning of the movie, it is clear that the plot displays some striking similitudes with the masterpiece of Peter Greenaway, "The draughtsman's contract". Therefore, Rousselot spent his time trying to make his own movie look different, but the result is sadly bad. The cinematography of the movie is beautiful, but there is no valuable plot and the characters have no existence. This is definitely a failure.