THE FRUIT OF PARADISE

OVOCE STROMU RAJSKYCH JIME

Director Vera Chytilová / 1970 / Czechoslovakia/Belgium

Can one live with the truth?

Eve in the Garden of Paradise listens to the Serpent. She is about to bite into the fruit of the Tree of Truth.

In 1970, in the garden of the boarding-house where the same holiday makers meet every year, Eve hands the apple to her husband Joseph. He declines the invitation.

Eve and Joseph are a couple amongst other couples. Eve suspects Joseph of being unfaithful. She wants to know the truth. When she does, she shuns it and struggles under its portentous weight to find her way through her troubled marriage, caught between her husband and a mysterious murderer.

To protect herself from the consequences of her knowledge, and to escape from Truth's inevitability, she turns in desperation to lies. The film tries at various ramifications and snatches at a wider truth through parable and symbolism.

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