Give Paul Schrader a prize!

In Venice this year he did not come into competition as he did in 2021 and 2017 but to collect the first real great prize of his life: the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Despite the successes Schrader he belongs to that category of filmmakers that the system does not reward, always marginal, always faithful to itself. She noticed it Venice (and thank goodness) and now in addition to rewarding him he shows his latest film: Master Gardener with Joel Edgerton. This time the job is a gardener. A tough gardener, who knows everything about the big garden of a rich woman who wants to excel at the annual fairs (Sigourney Weaver) and what he hides from his past has been tattooed on us, so we can’t forget it. They are tattoos from neo-Naziswastikas and double Ss, skulls and supremacist phrases.

He cannot be forgiven that past there, of violence and abuse, he wants to atone with an almost monastic life, all dedicated to work and to act as sexual entertainment for his mistress (not enjoying it but also as a practice). A girl with her problems will come to move him, to force him out of this process of atonement to take the reins of something and perhaps try to overcome the purgatory that she has drawn with the hope of accessing a form of paradise. After all, in the films of Paul Schrader there are always representations of hell, purgatory and heaven. The first is usually the terrible past to forget, the second the condition experienced by the protagonist, the third is a flash, perhaps a scene, which suggests what could be tomorrow (who has seen The card collector recalls a scene from above in a dark garden lit only by LEDs).